According to the IDC research group (IDC)< the total security appliance market showed positive growth in both vendor revenue and unit shipments for the fourth quarter of 2016 (4Q16).

Worldwide vendor revenues in the fourth quarter increased 9.2% year over year to $3.2 billion, and units showed an all-time record high in shipments for a single quarter with 764,974 units and 21.4% annual growth. For the full year 2016, worldwide security appliance revenue increased 8.9% to $11.5 billion when compared to 2015, while worldwide unit shipments increased 17% for a little over 2.7 million units shipped in 2016.

The trend for growth in the worldwide market driven by the Unified Threat Management (UTM) sub-market continues, with UTM almost tripling its size over the last five years and reaching record-high revenues of $5.6 billion for 2016 and year-over-year growth of 16.7%, the highest growth among all sub-markets. The UTM market represents today almost 50% of the worldwide revenues in the security appliance market.

The Firewall and Content Management sub-markets also had positive year-over-year revenue growth in 2016 with gains of 10.4% and 0.8%, respectively. The Intrusion Detection and Prevention and Virtual Private Network (VPN) sub-markets experienced weakening revenues in 2016 with year-over-year declines of 4.6% and 4.3%, respectively.