Does IBM Need a Firewall to Remain Competitive in the Network Security Appliance Market?

Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

• Despite talk about the death of the firewall, the technology remains strategic to large security vendors, prompting both significant internal development and big acquisitions.
• However, IBM remains out of that loop, and that could hurt its ability to compete as next-generation firewalls subsume standalone IPS products.

Despite talk of the demise of the firewall in recent years, there have been considerable movement and resources going into that market of late.  Last month, HP launched its first firewall, opting to develop its own next-generation firewall using technology borrowed from its TippingPoint IPS and Digital Vaccine modules for application visibility and control.  Earlier this year, McAfee plunked down $389 million in cash to acquire Stonesoft, giving McAfee its first stateful firewall to supplement its existing proxy-based firewall.  Beyond that, Fortinet most recently raised the bar on firewall performance in the data center, where it sees significant growth opportunities owing to the large-scale data center network refresh going on across the globe.