Firewall Market Grows 143 Percent
International Data Corp. (IDC, Framingham, Mass.) published "The Firewall Market, 1997," a report stating that firewall vendors experienced 143 percent revenue growth from 1996 to 1997, and that the market will reach $1.8 billion by 2002. Despite rapid recent and projected growth, IDC says that firewalls will, ultimately, evolve into a feature of other products. "For all these rosy forecasts, we believe the firewall market and all its major vendors are migrating toward a broader orientation," says Chris Christiansen, director, IDC’s Internet security research services. "In the short term, we expect firewalls to become platforms for the deployment of other products such as VPNs, authentication, public key infrastructures and enterprise security suites."