Worldwide security software revenue grew by 4.9 percent to $19.9 billion in 2013 as against $19.0 billion in 2013, according to Gartner, the US-based technology research company.
The company says the lower-than-expected growth was due to commoditization of key sub-segments and the decline in growth for two of the top five vendors.
“The market experienced slower, but still healthy, growth in 2013. This slightly tempered growth was partly due to the increased commoditization of the endpoint security (particularly consumer endpoint software) and secure email gateway (SEG) sub-segments (particularly consumer endpoint software) that in 2013 accounted for around 25 percent of the total security software market,” said Ruggero Contu, Research Director at Gartner.
“Overall, the larger trend that emerged in 2013 was that of the democratization of security threats, driven by the easy availability of malicious software and infrastructure (via the underground economy) that can be used to launch advanced targeted attacks. This ubiquity of security threats has led organizations to realize that traditional security approaches have gaps, thereby leading them to rethink and invest more in security technology”, Contu added.
According to him, “the consequent involvement of the business in security purchase decisions has both a positive and negative effect on software vendor revenue. With every company becoming a technology company, more organizations are now looking to leverage a multitude of data points to become more competitive. This desire to become more digital brings with it its own challenges in terms of securing this data to prevent data breaches and to protect against advanced targeted attacks.”
Symantec, though with slightly lower revenue compared to 2012, led the market with 18.7 percent market share and total revenue of $3.7 billion. McAfee took the second spot with $1.2 billion in revenue and a market share of 8.7 percent. IBM made $1.3 in revenue and a market share of 5.7 percent.
Trend Micro comes next with $1.1 billion in revenue and a market share of 5.6 percent. EMC made $760 in revenue with a market share of 3.8 percent. Other security software provider together made $11.5 billion in revenue with 57.5 percent market share.
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