UTM in China

In China, UTM (Unified Threats Management) has been rocketing in recent months, not only in the media, but also in the real market transactions. International vendors, such as Fortinet, Watchguard, Sonicwall, ZyXel, bomb the newspapers, journals and other soft-ad everyday, while Cisco, Juniper, Symantec, Securecomputing, McAfee and etc. keep talking on their vision of UTM directions. Of course, the prediction of IDC’s report on UTM market that UTM will occupy 57.6% of total firewall, vpn, and anti-virus market share is one of the main stir and encouragement to the investment. Then, how is everything going about those local security vendors? Yes, they won’t just stand by and watch the growth, instead they are deeply involved in this arena.

During the past 1-2 years, most of those major players in China security market have been brewing and rolling-out their UTM products. Kingsoft is one of the top three local anti-virus vendors in China(the other two is Rising and Jiangmin). Recently, they inked the agreement with xScreen on the UTM product OEM cooperation. In conjunction with their desktop antivirus/firewall/IDS, anti-virus gateway and server protection, no one would like to ignor their competition in the total security solution for SMB.

According to the UTM description by IDC, anti-virus is one basic function of UTM devices, ie. it’s easier for those anti-virus vendors to turn to catch up UTM market. So it’s an easy job to predict that Rising/Jiangmin/CA-JC won’t wait long time to sell their UTM.

As to the UTM market, OEM is doomed to be a good choice for those vendors who want to break into this market. Because a single core technology within a UTM, such as firewall, VPN, IDS engine, and anti-virus engine, is a little bit overwhelming for an average vendor to develop from the much beginning. As a proof of my point, IDC’s report list reflect the anti-virus engine OEMed in the major UTM products. So again it’s easy to predict there are more and more vendors choose OEM to enhance their features and shorten the rolling-out time. It must leave such technology companies as xScreen a big space to make money and grow.

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2. China is fielding Cyber Army
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6. China accused of information warfare

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