Spending growth in the Australian IT security market place will jump an additional two to eight per cent in the second half of 2009 on the back of user optimism, according to analyst firm, Gartner.
The positive forecast comes on the back of Gartner’s 2008 Asia-Pacific security market results, which showed the market grew 28.3 per cent in 2008, down from 36 per cent in 2007.
Australia was the second-largest market in the region behind China, with above average growth of 27.5 per cent. Domestically, total revenues hit $248.6 million with Symantec retaining the greatest market share across the whole region ahead of Trend Micro, McAfee, EMC and IBM.
“In Australia, for 2009, according to our first quarter forecast it was around 13 per cent,” Gartner senior research analyst, Matthew Cheung, said. “But actually in Q3 we are going to revise this number. I think we are going to upgrade the number to be 15 per cent growth in 2009 because we see that there is some recovery in the region. We think the market has bottomed and in the second half of 2009 the market will catch up.
“Also, because we have done some user surveys in the region and got user feedback on the security spending perspective, we see that the Australian respondents are still very optimistic about the security spending this year. That’s why we are going to upgrade the growth rate for 2009. I believe it will fall within 15 to 20 per cent range.”
One of the biggest drivers in Australian organisations’ spending is compliance concerns while consumer security and enterprise endpoint protection were the biggest sub-segments, according to the Gartner research.
Fellow analyst firm, IDC, also recently said 87 per cent of respondents to an April survey titled IDC APJ Continuum Survey would continue to spend the same amount or more on security in 2009. Only 2.4 per cent said they would decrease spending.
Frost & Sullivan analyst, Andrew Milroy, meanwhile, said although the firm’s numbers had not been finalised there had been a slow down in sales growth in the first quarter of the 2009 calendar year.
“Sure people are cutting back in big investments, and that would include security,” he said. “But security has been one of the most resilient areas and not just in Australia, I think you’d find that in economies that have been hit much worse.”
