Hamburg, Germany, March 28, 2012 – gateProtect has been recognized in the market for unified threat management (UTM) in the latest Magic Quadrant from Gartner. According to the research analysts, the global market in this area experienced strong growth of 19.5 per cent between 2010 and 2011. The German-based IT security provider believes it is well equipped to handle the challenges associated with this level of growth.

Dr. Peter Smeets, CEO of gateProtect, comments: “The growing number of midsized companies in emerging countries and markets around the world will only buy UTM solutions if it’s quick and easy to set up and manage them. These customers are either buying a firewall for the first time, or are upgrading from a basic solution to a UTM system. In addition, they often have limited financial and staff resources. We’re a midsized firm ourselves and know how important productivity and simplicity is – with IT solutions in general and security solutions in particular.”

gateProtect operates an indirect sales model and has expanded significantly over the last few years. The German-based provider of next-generation UTM solutions has been able to sign up several well-known and competent partners, especially in the booming emerging markets of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. With every new partnership, the gateProtect solutions’ ease of use, due to the eGUI user interface, was the argument that clinched the deal from the partner’s perspective. This is because eGUI shows firewall rules in a process-oriented way rather than in a table, as is often the case with competitors’ solutions. Using the graphical representation of their network components, administrators can define access rights and the data flow within the company by simple drag and drop. gateProtect UTM solutions can also be set up by less specialized administrators in a few minutes, while still ensuring optimal security.

Midsized companies as main market:
Gartner believes that midsized firms are the main market for UTM solutions and defines them as companies that have between 100 and 1000 employees. “This is a very broad segment and is best approached on a functional level,” explains Dr. Peter Smeets. “We recently presented Version 9.1 of our next-generation firewall at CeBIT 2012 with its integrated LAN accounting feature. This is likely to be of particular interest to companies in countries that do not yet have a high-performance internet infrastructure because it enables businesses, schools and public authorities to better manage bandwidth utilization by setting limits for internet usage time and data transfer volumes. Our next-generation UTM solutions are able to effectively block complex threats, even in times of cloud computing and mobility, and at prices appropriate to this target market.”

About the Magic Quadrant:
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This press release can be downloaded at: http://www.gateprotect.com and http://www.phronesis.de