Nemertes Impact Analysis

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Nemertes provides expert insight on how recent IT news affects you.

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WatchGuard Extends UTM to XTM: Does X Make U Better?

Privately held WatchGuard has announced plans to extend unified threat
management (UTM) to what they call extensible threat management (XTM). Though
not extensible in terms of open APIs, WatchGuard's approach is to move beyond
simple integration to a more comprehensive solution. This is in line with
Nemertes' issue paper, Defining the 'U" in UTM: Unified, Ubiquitous or
Useless? This Issue Paper discusses UTM's evolutionary movement from simple
consolidation to a more complete, ubiquitous, risk-based security solution.

Impacts:

Enterprises: Most UTM solutions are still focused on security function
consolidation. Look for more than just a security Swiss Army knife.

Vendors: All UTM vendors should be moving up the protocol stack and beyond
network level security and access control to more ubiquitous threat management.

Investors: UTM giants, such as Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Juniper (NASDAQ:JNPR)
will consolidate the market by acquiring smaller players, such as privately held
Fortinet and WatchGuard.

http://www.nemertes.com/issue_papers/nemertes_issue_paper_defining_%E2%80%9Cu%E2%80%9D_utm_unified_ubiquitous_or_useless_0 [3]
http://www.watchguard.com/press/releases/wg406.asp [4]

Ted Ritter, Research Analyst