Features

IDC Sees APAC Security Software Market to Reach USD 1.7 billion by 2010

By Sophia Mayengbam

The Asia Pacific market has seen a tremendous growth in information technology market in the last one decade. The establishment of new IT organisations naturally led to growth in enterprise IT sector too. Among all, one of the most important enterprise solutions that an IT organisation is indispensable with is security software. Security software market is no doubt at its highest peak in Asia Pacific market with total of USD 805 million in 2005. This represents a growth of more than 23 percent year-over-year, according to results from IT research firm IDC’s APAC (excluding Japan) semiannual security software tracker.

According to the research continued growth is expected with India, PRC and Malaysia leading the growth. However, Australia is expected to remain the largest market in the region 2010. IDC forecasts the APAC (excluding Japan) security software market to rise to USD 1.7 billion by 2010, representing a CAGR of more than 15 percent.

The research found that the secure content management market was very strong in 2005, achieving a growth of 34 percent over the previous year. It retains the majority share of the security software market in APAC, accounting for more than 57 percent of the market. Demand for protection against viruses, spyware, spam and other malicious code underpinned the growth in this market.

The security and vulnerability software market, which includes software that focus on allowing organisations to determine, interpret, and improve their risk posture, also experienced healthy growth in 2005.

IDC notes that security management will continue to be a challenge for enterprises. As resource constraints continued to be levied on IT (security) departments, all else being equal, a less complex and hence more manageable security solution is most likely to get the nod. However, the firewall/VPN and intrusion detection and prevention software markets experienced a much smaller growth.

"Security features are increasingly being built into the IT infrastructure, including operating systems and networking equipment. The firewall/VPN and the intrusion detection/prevention software markets are especially hard-hit by this trend. At the same time, these markets are also being cannibalised by appliance solutions," says Willie Low, Senior Market Analyst, Asia/Pacific Infrastructure Software Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.

He further said that this is the time for the software vendors to capitalise and take advantage of this trend or re-evaluate their value proposition and align themselves accordingly.