NetScreen Named VPN and Firewall Market Leader

March 5, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- NetScreen Technologies Inc. (netscreen.com), a leading developer of ASIC-based Internet security systems and appliances, announced on Tuesday that it had received top rankings in key sectors of the VPN and firewall markets in the US and Canada in a recent report by Infonetics Research Inc., a leading market research firm.

NetScreen says that, based on reported unit shipment data for all of 2001, it rated third in the market for VPN hardware supporting more than 1,000 tunnels and second, behind Cisco in the overall market. NetScreen ranked number one in the market for VPN hardware supporting 100 or fewer tunnels, a market that it has now led for two years.

The company says it was also ranked second in both the gigabit firewall and under 10-megabit per second firewall segments.

The Infonetics report, says NetScreen, also included market data for the fourth quarter of 2001, during which NetScreen moved into second place, ahead of Nokia Internet Communications, in the high-end dedicated VPN hardware market.

"Enterprises looking to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs are increasingly turning toward hardware-based security solutions," says David Flynn, vice president of marketing for NetScreen. "While initially deployed at remote sites, enterprises are increasingly implementing purpose-built security solutions at their central sites because of improved performance and reduced complexity compared to solutions that attempt to cobble together generic hardware platforms with security software."

Infonetics, which regularly tracks the performance of VPN and firewall vendors based on reported revenue and units shipped, says that the hardware security market grew well from 2000 to 2001, and that the success of NetScreen’s ASIC-based approach to integrated security systems has now led to some imitation by competitors.