Enterprise security revenue growth has decelerated, partly due to the changing attack landscape that is characterised by a more targeted breed of data breaches.
To adapt to diminishing growth opportunities, vendors are adjusting investments and ownership in security business units, taking drastic steps to address slowing market movement.
In the past year, IT systems vendors such as Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Intel made acquisitions or spun out large portions of their security portfolios.
“These are very disruptive, and in some cases unprecedented, steps that shifted competitive positions and market shares,” Technology Business Research principal analyst, Jane Wright, said.
“The enterprise security market of the future will be more heavily influenced and controlled by pure play security vendors and their investment partners.”
In this changing competitive environment, Wright believes security vendors will face increased pressure from boards and investors to achieve both growth and profitability.
According to TBR findings, ten of the 24 benchmarked vendors accomplished this difficult feat in 2Q16.
TBR aligned benchmarked vendors’ R&D and sales and marketing investments with revenue growth rates to uncover the most effective investment strategies of small, midsize and large security vendors.
Successful (i.e., profitable and growing) small security vendors, for example, spent 16.3 per cent of revenue on R&D and 26.3 per cent of revenue on sales and marketing, on average, in 2Q16.
Although overall year-to-year revenue growth for benchmarked vendors decelerated from 20.8 per cent in 2Q15 to 15.9 per cent in 2Q16, some segments of the enterprise security market captured larger portions of customers’ spending.
Meanwhile, the endpoint security and security management segments netted the largest increases in customers’ security spending over the past two years, as customers recognised the growing importance of securing endpoints outside their corporate firewalls and managing complex security deployments for improved threat detection and response.
