darkREADING | Channel Best Sellers: Security

Channel Best Sellers: Security
Courtesy of CRN

MARCH 9, 2007 | WatchGuard spent most of 2006 mired in uncertainty as rumors swirled it was shopping itself to private ownership. In July, rumor turned to reality as the vendor was acquired by private equity fund Francisco Partners.

But despite WatchGuard’s struggles, the vendor was still able to maintain healthy sales of its VPN products through major distributors, as evidenced by data from The NPD Group/Distributor Track. The data shows WatchGuard claimed 55.1 percent of the U.S. dollar volume share in VPN product sales, nearly 25 percentage points higher than Check Point Software Technologies, which placed second with 30.6 percent.

The NPD data includes POS information from certain key distributors, including members of the Global Technology Distribution Council. Rounding out the top four best-sellers of VPNs were SonicWall, with 2006 share of 10.4 percent, and Netgear, with 3.9 percent.

Simplicity and ease of use have helped WatchGuard claim a solid niche in the small- and midsize-business market, according to solution providers.

WatchGuard “provides an immense amount of value with low total cost of ownership,” said Carl Mazzanti, CEO of eMazzanti Technologies, Hoboken, N.J.

The user interface for Watchguard’s VPN products is particularly helpful for companies that have IT staff with limited experience, he said. “They’ve spent a great deal of time working on the user interface, so that on a non-typical core competency for an edge device, the average IT administrator can pick up, manage, configure, implement and maintain a Watchguard VPN,” Mazzanti said.

SonicWall, another vendor that has built a channel around SMB-friendly products, was the top-growth best-seller in the VPN category, posting a U.S. dollar volume share increase of 0.5 percentage points. SonicWall’s success can be traced to enhancements to the VPN feature set, with one of the most popular being NetExtender, a downloadable thin client that gives users access to servers and applications on the corporate network, said Deepak Thadani, president of SysIntegrators, a solution provider in Woodside, N.Y. “SonicWall’s VPN is inexpensive, easy to use, and it works. It’s that simple,” Thadani said.

— Kevin McLaughlin, Barbara Darrow, Paula Rooney, CRN