Channel Best-Sellers: Security

According to The NPD Group/Distributor Track, which monitors the U.S. dollar volume sales of high-tech products through certain major distributors, Symantec held a 55.6 percent share of the firewall segment at the end of 2005, compared with Cisco's 17.8 percent.

Solution providers point to two key events as the impetus for what amounted to a dramatic turnaround last year. In June, Symantec said it would decrease its investment in security appliances, including the Symantec Gateway Security appliance line, which includes firewall capabilities. Then, Cisco in July added two new models to its Adaptive Security Appliance unified threat management series, which also includes a firewall.

In the wake of these events, Cisco's U.S. dollar volume share for firewalls leapt nearly 20 percentage points in 2006 to 37.7 percent, overtaking Symantec's results, which slipped 21 percentages points to 34.6 percent, the NPD data shows.

A big reason for Cisco's firewall market leadership is the trend toward companies looking to consolidate multiple functions within a single appliance, which has helped fuel sales of the ASA line, said Steven Reese, security practice manager at Nexus Integration Services, a Valencia, Calif., solution provider.

Now that management scale has become an operational function, simplifying management of security infrastructure is many companies' primary goal, he said.

Steve Pettit, president of Blue Spruce Technologies, Greenland, N.H., is seeing "a lot of customers" upgrading from Cisco's PIX firewall to the ASA, and he thinks the ASA series is also taking market share away from Cisco competitors including Symantec and Check Point Software Technologies, which was the third best-seller in this segment with a 15.2 percent share.

Cisco's SmartNet support is another reason behind the vendor's recent firewall market gains because customers like having an entire organization that works with them to support complex solutions, said Gary Berzack, CTO of Cisco partner eTribeca, New York.

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