For a company that started out as a firewall company and used to be better known as a firewall company, WatchGuard has come a long way. Founded in 1996 and achieving public then private status in 1999 and 2006 respectively, the company has had to move the direction they did,  in the name of keeping up with the times.

Global CEO for WatchGuard, Joe Wang explains, “In the past few years we have really transformed into a UTM or unified threat management company.” UTM which came about just a few years ago means instead of providing different solutions in different hardware boxes and chaining them together, one provides a single product and all the different security capabilities in that one single box.

WatchGuard isn’t the only company to offer UTM solutions of course, and Wang cites itself and security solutions provider Fortinet as two examples of pure UTM players. “There are other players like Cisco and CheckPoint, but Fortinet and ourselves are probably the two best known pure UTM players with offerings that reflect our focus in the area.”

The software approach

Wang states that because of their focus, their UTM functions are more complete, but even so, their software approach gives them differentiated offerings from the likes of hardware-based players like Fortinet. “On the product side, we focus more on performance. We are a software company even though we deliver hardware products. Ninety-five percent of our engineers are software engineers. We are pure software.” Wang believes that as a result of this, they are able to deliver better management and ease-of-use.

“Other UTM players still invest a lot on hardware, for example, make ASIC chips and putting a lot of energy to putting certain capabilities into hardware. As a result, their advantages can be leadership in basic packet filtering capabilities,” Wang points out.

“Our customer base, want better software performance in terms of; if you compare a company that  uses anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering, intrusion prevention and so on; most of our customers need these functionalities and use our products as a standard security appliance.

In that particular situation, our products are better because our focus is on the UTM performance.”

This is because of the emphasis that WatchGuard places on ease-of-use. “That is what WatchGuard is known for… we integrate all these tech together and we invest a lot into the user interface. a lot of our software energies and capabilities go into the direction of an easy-to-use interface.”

When not to reinvent the wheel

The security appliance company also claims to be more open in terms of what they put into their products. “We have adopted the business model of going out to partner with the best vendors to provide the best UTM product. For example our anti-virus is really developed by AVG and our Web blocking technology is from Websense.”

‘“We are mostly a software house; we get the best software vendors, put them together and make sure from the software perspective they are all very well-integrated with a common interface.If you develop your own solution, our belief is that no company can develop the best technology in every field. That’s our belief thus we partner with other companies to deliver solutions to our customers.

“Many of the technologies are our own as well, but in areas that we think it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel, then we will partner with the best.”

Wang admits that costs are a little high from having to pay license fees, but in the end it means better solutions. “We make a little less profit from each sale, but the volume of our sales makes up for it. Our end users know they are not using a unified solution with twelve technologies all from from the one same vendor. It cannot be as good as when you combine the capabilities of all the best vendors in the world.”

A growing market

The unified threat management market is growing quite nicely according to Wang who also adds that he sees growth for the industry worldwide. “We are quite balanced with about 50-percent of our revenue coming from the Americas. Thirty-eight percent revenue comes from Europe and the Middle East with the remaining 12-percent from Asia Pacific including Japan and Australia.”

But APAC’s least revenue contribution standing is about to change. “Ten years ago, more developed countries paid more attention to security but I think that is changing now. We have seen substantial growth in APAC. Last year, it grew over 25-percent.” That’s a growth rate that is more than the US’ or Europe’s.  But the big growth spurt is a trend that seems to be prevalent in other emerging regions like Latin America, as well.

“Countries are paying more attention now and want to protect their organisations. Developed countries tend to have some solution in existence already and to migrate them to a new unified one, takes time. Renewal times for different point tools differ and it’s a slow process time.”

UTM is also an attractive solution for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) who don’t want to break the bank and don’t have the resources for a dedicated security team. “SMEs don’t have a choice about not protecting their business and UTM is the best choice for them,” says Wang. WatchGuard solutions also have an upgradeability path which makes it an attractive choice, especially for SMEs which are expanding and growing.

The path to growth

Wang says, “We have products from smaller boxes for small companies all the way  to products serving companies with tens of thousands of employees. So, we have different models because when the company is changing in size then their needs may be different.”

“We recommend companies to look at new solutions every three years just because the software always constantly changes because we need to develop new features and capabilities to address new threats.”  WatchGuard’s business model is such so that the annual subscription fees entitles software license holders to new features and new releases, automatically.

For the hardware product however, it is not so simple especially if the business is experiencing a high growth spurt. “If a company grew from 25 people to 250 people, then they’d probably need to change their hardware.”

However,  if a company’s growth is within the range of users that their existing hardware model series can support, then just a software upgrade would do. “We are the only company that provides that kind of upgradeability,” Wang says.