Firewalls take spending forefront: Some 57 percent of enterprises responding to an Infonetics Research survey said they plan to spend $500,000 or more in 2014 to upgrade their firewalls to high-speed network interfaces. Security is the chief reason cited, of course, to do so, and many of those upgrades will take place in the data center. The increase in spending could lead to interesting market shifts as Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Juniper (NYSE: JNPR) fend off challenges from other equipment providers. FortiNet, Palo Alto, Dell and Check Point will all be working to land deals with data centers and large campuses. "Without a doubt, the move to faster network technologies is forcing enterprises to look at upgrading every moving part of their IT infrastructure, firewalls included," explains Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics. "Many enterprise buyers are eyeing firewall products with 100G-plus aggregate throughput and support for 40G and 100G ports over the next year." Release
Core routers to see double-digit growth: Expect a rebound in the service provider core router market in 2014 and 2015, Dell'Oro Group says. Upgraded Internet backbones and improved core router capacities will push the market into double-digit growth. "We also expect core routers and new high-capacity edge routers to be deployed into numerous metro area networks to accommodate localized traffic loads," said Alam Tamboli, business analyst at Dell'Oro. "Service providers will continue to increase purchases of these routers as they extend their backbone networks closer to end users to handle regional traffic." Release
Parental control software market still fragmented: The market for parental control software will be worth $1.04 billion in 2013, driven mostly by consumer spending but also by educational institutions like schools and libraries, ABI Research says. Although this segment is a lucrative one, with demand for filtering, blocking and control technologies quite high, the market is still fragmented due to varied demand from both large organizations and individual consumers. "While advanced digital education for children remains deficient, the demand for control and blocking solutions remains high, and is creating a highly fragmented, ad-hoc yet competitive market for parental control vendors," says Michela Menting, senior analyst at ABI Research. "Over time however, as the digital knowledge gap closes, educational solutions will feature much more prominently in the market for child online protection." Release