RE: 10 years and no ubiquitous security

Alex Alten <Alten@attbi.com> Tue, 19 March 2002 05:19 UTC

Received: from lists.tislabs.com (portal.gw.tislabs.com [192.94.214.101]) by above.proper.com (8.11.6/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g2J5JN422085; Mon, 18 Mar 2002 21:19:23 -0800 (PST)
Received: by lists.tislabs.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) id XAA12815 Mon, 18 Mar 2002 23:43:56 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <3.0.3.32.20020318205723.013a5b00@mail>
X-Sender: alten@mail
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.3 (32)
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:57:23 -0800
To: Michael Choung Shieh <mshieh@netscreen.com>, "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>, William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
From: Alex Alten <Alten@attbi.com>
Subject: RE: 10 years and no ubiquitous security
Cc: ietf@ietf.org, ipsec@lists.tislabs.com
In-Reply-To: <9D048F4A422CD411A56500B0D0209C5B028F3D98@NS-CA>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Sender: owner-ipsec@lists.tislabs.com
Precedence: bulk

Sigh.  I knew I shouldn't have put a dollar figure in my response.

Michael you have to take those reports with a grain of salt, dollar
amounts tend to be meaningless.  At the risk of getting nailed here's
how I did my math.  Red Creek last year shipped about 1% of the hw
IPsec VPN boxes worldwide.  They were bought for about $10M (if I
remember correctly).  Thus implicitly valuing all the firms, divisions
of firms, etc., at about $1B.  Generally speaking in a growth industry
you pay about 5x revenues.  So this means the industry last year
probably had about $200M in revenues. I may be off a bit, maybe its
$300M, but that's about how much money is being paid by real customers
per year.  It's not a huge market, at least not based on my back-of-
the-envelope calculations.  If I'm wrong then I'm sure one of your
marketing guys can correct me with more accurate numbers.

- Alex

At 07:56 PM 3/18/2002 -0800, Michael Choung Shieh wrote:
>
>FYI.  Dedicated VPN HW Hits $1.3 Billion as shown at
>http://www.infonetics.com/resources/quarterly_worldwide_market_share_forecas
>ts_4q01.htm  It has a sizeable installation out there, though it does have
>some large deployment issues.
>
>Michael Shieh
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Alex Alten [mailto:Alten@attbi.com]
>Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 5:26 PM
>To: Steven M. Bellovin; William Allen Simpson
>Cc: ietf@ietf.org; ipsec@lists.tislabs.com
>Subject: Re: 10 years and no ubiquitous security 
>
>[... skip...]
>
> It seems to have decided, IPsec has settled into a fairly modest
>VPN market niche ($200M/yr revenues or so?). It is not turned on by
>(or not available on) at least 99% of the Internet hosts.
>
>[... skip....]
>
>- Alex
>
>
>--
>
>Alex Alten
>Alten@ATTBI.com
>
--

Alex Alten
Alten@ATTBI.com