Worldwide security software revenue totaled $16.5 billion in 2010, a 12 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $14.7 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The 2010 results show that overall vendor revenue demonstrated a rebound in growth after a sharp fall in performance in 2009 due to the slow economy and tight IT budgets.
“Products within the security market are undergoing rapid evolution, in terms of both new delivery models, with security as a service showing increasing popularity, and new technologies being introduced, often by startup companies,” said Ruggero Contu, principal research analyst at Gartner.
“Key vendors continued to expand their product portfolios, buying companies where appropriate and expanding their reach into emerging markets.”
Growth across the security segments showed great levels of variation, with more mature areas, such as endpoint security and Web access management, showing single-digit growth, while security information and event management (SIEM) and secure Web gateway products experienced double-digit growth.
Symantec retained its market share lead and accounted for nearly 19 percent of total security software revenue in 2010. Performance of the largest players varied considerably; Symantec, Trend Micro and IBM recorded below-average growth, while other larger players, such as EMC, experienced above-average growth.
Contu said the security market can be divided into four groups of vendors from a competitive perspective. At the top are the large vendors Symantec and McAfee, with a strong presence in both the consumer and enterprise markets, as well as 30 percent combined market share. On the second tier is a group of vendors that offer a breadth of product capabilities covering many of the security segments — some with an almost complete focus on security, such as Trend Micro, and others, such as IBM, EMC, Cisco and CA Technologies, for which security is only a part of overall corporate interests. A third tier is composed of specialized midsize vendors, such as Kaspersky, Websense, Sophos, Blue Coat Systems and ESET, which tend to have more of a focus on certain segments in which they have built a relatively strong presence. The fourth tier is composed of large IT vendors with a small presence in the security space or small players with specialization in one or two security segments.