For the Fifth Time … #1 in Market Share

It is that time of the year when the independent analyst firm, IHS Markit, releases its annual market share report for network monitoring equipment, aka network packet brokers. For the fifth consecutive year, Gigamon has been named #1 in overall market share by a solid margin, accounting for 37 percent market share in calendar year 2017, increasing our lead over our closest competitor to 21 percent.

Read the IHS Markit report >

That is right, Gigamon today has more than twice the market share of its closest competitor. In some verticals such as Government, the dominant market share that we already had in 2016 (59 percent) expanded further to 61 percent in 2017, per this report. To our customers and partners who have helped us grow our market leadership — thank you for placing your trust in us! Special thanks also to our wonderful colleagues at Gigamon who create and deliver our innovative solutions to our partners and customers every day.

Practically any market sees a clear leader emerge over time. Several years back in the Harvard Business Review article, “The Value of Leadership Economics,” the authors explained why this phenomenon happens. Focus on a company’s core competence drives dominance, that dominance generates profits, which in turn is fueled back into the business. When one combines higher absolute profits with a pursuit of customer-centric innovation, the market leader over time generates disproportionate value for customers and new prospects, which in turn makes it difficult for other competitors to catch up.

Between 2013 and 2017, our market share has grown from 26 to 37 percent, primarily because of this combination of focus and customer-centric innovation. At Gigamon, we are delighted that our focus on customer-centric innovation liberates us to expand the frontiers of our market and explore new ways to deliver the power of visibility using network traffic to maximize value for customers.

This brings us to the question of why customers are investing in visibility via network packet brokers today. We can distill the many reasons to three major value drivers:

• Access and control of data — Across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure, this is a pain point that resonates with both enterprises and service providers. Network upgrades, especially to 100Gb, exacerbates this need.
• Increase efficiency and decrease complexity in their security stack — Today’s enterprise security stack is far too siloed, inefficient and in desperate need for simplicity! Whether it is improving the efficiency of SIEMs (Security Information and Event Management) or increasing the efficiency of an inline threat prevention stack or decreasing the complexity of encrypted traffic management, security administrators are clearly looking for a change from the status quo.
• Improve overall security posture — For security administrators, this is no longer a cliché. The ferocity and velocity of cybersecurity attacks is outpacing the ability of security defenders to keep up. This is why last year we rolled out the Defender Lifecycle Model to enable security administrators to think differently.

Exciting times are ahead as the applicable use cases for this space only seem to expand!