The data was reported on Tuesday by Gartner, and showed that International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) moved into third place in the vendor rankings with a market share of 5.7%, ahead of Japan’s Trend Micro, which claimed a share of 5.6%. IBM’s revenue rose more than 19% in 2013, while Trend Micro’s revenue was down more than 5%.
The top two vendors, Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) and Intel Corp.’s (NASDAQ: INTC) McAfee, remain comfortably atop the rankings with market share of 18.7% and 8.7%, respectively. However Symantec’s revenue slipped 0.3% year-over-year in 2013 while McAfee’s grew by 3.9%.
Gartner’s research director said:
Overall, the larger trend that emerged in 2013 was that of the democratization of security threats, driven by the easy availability of malicious software and infrastructure (via the underground economy) that can be used to launch advanced targeted attacks. This ubiquity of security threats has led organizations to realize that traditional security approaches have gaps, thereby leading them to rethink and invest more in security technology. … [T]he high penetration rate of consolidated and mature technology areas such as consumer security software, endpoint protection and secure email gateway, has resulted in increased pricing pressure, along with the bundling of capabilities in suite offerings in the identity and access management (IAM) space (user provisioning [UP] and Web access management [WAM]), which leads to a slowdown in discrete new license revenue.
Gartner noted that the top four vendors claim 39% of the security software market and that 2013 marks the first time in “many years” that a company that is not a pure-play security vendor has been ranked among the top three security software vendors. IBM’s ascendancy is likely due to its acquisition last year of security software firm Trusteer Ltd.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks