2016 vs 2010 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Firewalls

Gartner released the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Firewalls almost two weeks ago.

The biggest surprise is how stratified Gartner views this market.  There are two leaders, two challengers, and all other vendors tied for last-place.

What is going on?


The enterprise firewall market experienced significant disruption with the introduction of "next-gen" marketing and capability.  The "next-gen" product vision rapidly reshaped market demand and eventually market share.  Many vendors failed to adjust quickly (or at all) to these new expectations.

Enterprise firewall is a very mature market. According to CheckPoint, Gartner's analysis dates back at least 19 years.  Many of the vendors listed have been in the firewall business for a long, long time.

Four vendors are dominating the market?  Not exactly.

Of the four dominant vendors, only Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks increased execution ability (vertical axis increase) since 2010 .  In contrast - Checkpoint, Cisco, Juniper, McAfee (now Forepoint), and Astaro (now Sophos) all lost ability to execute in the enterprise firewall market.

I think Gartner's assessment is accurate, at least within North America.

Incumbent customers with Checkpoint, Cisco, and perhaps outstanding Juniper installations may stay the course.  Network-focused operations teams and/or change adverse leadership may deliberately (or through inaction) avoid high displacement costs tied to retraining staff and converting established policies. Entrenched internal experts may view their careers closely tied to incumbents, Cisco and Checkpoint especially.

In sharp contrast, greenfield selections led by forward looking security leadership are much more likely to choose one of the two ascendants.  Fortinet has shown service provider differentiation by offering attractive price/performance, plus early support within IaaS Clouds, such as AWS and Azure.  Palo Alto Networks demonstrates enterprise differentiation where security-first use cases dominate.  Palo Alto Networks also maintains integration alliances (Carbon Black, VMware, ProtectWise, Nutanix, etc), important for best-of-breed designers.

Finally, Sophos - falling to nitch - is poised to carve a foothold in SMB and low cost markets.  Sophos offers free to use, fully functional software editions for commercial and home users - but needs better marketing to grow visibility and toehold installations, providing future converts to paid business.

Observations:

• Fortinet, Cisco, and Checkpoint quadrant positions remain unchanged.
• McAfee (now forcepoint) fell from a challenger position.
• Astaro (now Sophos) slipped from a visionary.
• Juniper tumbled from a leadership position.
• Palo Alto Networks leapt into the leaders quadrant.

SOURCE:
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls (25 May 2016)
Analyst(s): Adam Hils, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Rajpreet Kaur, Greg Young