Organisations' efforts to safeguard against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to manage the rise in BYOD fuelled Q4 market expansion, said Canalys.

Sales across EMEA grew 9 per cent year-on-year and nearly 13 per cent on the previous quarter to $674m, the beancounter confirmed.

Networking linchpin Cisco led the market, growing nearly 19 per cent to $179m, accounting for more than one-quarter (26.6 per cent) of the entire space on the back of aggressive pricing and some decent high-end contract wins.

The analyst said product refreshes to Cisco's ASA family and additions to its mid-range appliances are expected but said the firm needed to work more closely with resellers to "win more security-specific deals" on top of networking.

Checkpoint turned over $130.3m worth of network security kit in the quarter, up 19.3 per cent on the previous year to grab a 19.2 per cent market share. Fortinet also posted double-digit growth of 10.3 per cent to $49m.

Moving in the opposite direction, Juniper Networks sales declined 14.6 per cent to $65.6m due to weaker spending among service providers and IBM revenues fell 3.5 per cent to $22.9m.

Application control capability in firewalls will become standard this year and vendors are likely to structure their portfolios to hone in on specific verticals including data centres, managed security services and SMEs, said Canalys.

“But we also expect to see more aggressive pricing, through discounts and channel promotions, and this will often be led by smaller vendors confident they can take share from the larger, broader players," said senior analyst Alex Smith. ®