McAfee, Inc., today announced that leading research firm Gartner, Inc. has placed the company in the leaders’ quadrant in its “Magic Quadrant for Network Intrusion Prevention System Appliances, 1H09” as published on April 14, 2009.
The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner.
According to Gartner, vendors listed in the leader’s quadrant “demonstrate balanced progress and effort in all execution and vision categories. Their actions raise the competitive bar for all products in the market, and they can change the course of the industry. To remain leaders, vendors must demonstrate a track record of delivering successfully in enterprise IPS deployments and in winning competitive assessments.”
Gartner further stated, “Leaders produce products that provide high signature quality and low latency, are innovating with or ahead of customer challenges (such as using endpoint intelligence to make more-efficient detections) and have a range of models. Leaders continually win selections and are consistently visible on enterprise shortlists. However, a leading vendor is not a default choice for every buyer, and clients should not assume that they must buy only from vendors in the Leaders quadrant.”
Factors contributing to a company’s ability to execute include products and services, overall viability, sales and marketing execution, and customer experience. Gartner evaluates a company’s completeness of vision by considering its market understanding, sales and marketing strategy, offering or product strategy, business model, and innovation.
“We believe our position in the leaders’ quadrant of this highly-regarded network IPS assessment confirms McAfee’s commitment to Network IPS and Network Security,” said Rees Johnson, general manager for IPS at McAfee.
“Customers and partners turn to McAfee’s network IPS solutions because of our comprehensive, integrated and proven approach to network security. Our ability to create vulnerability signatures based on protocol analysis protects our customers much better than products that rely primarily on traditional pattern matching. For example, with conficker, one signature did the job, unlike our competition that not only created multiple signatures, but also made numerous modifications over several months to match our accuracy. Our approach offers both superior protection and decreased maintenance costs,” added Johnson.
Since pioneering the IPS industry with the world’s first purpose-built intrusion detection and prevention appliance, the McAfee network security platform has continued to raise the bar for next-generation IPS technology.
Earlier this year, McAfee participated in the NSS Labs 10Gbps Group Test, and is the only vendor to achieve certification in this rigorous test. “The M-8000 Network IPS appliance performed at over 10Gbps with near perfect detection accuracy,” said Johnson. “This certification, combined with Gartner’s independent evaluation of our Network IPS solutions, demonstrates McAfee’s leadership in Network IPS and Network Security.”