Symantec remains #1 in worldwide security software market share report

The results for Gartner's worldwide security software market share report are in and Symantec remains on top.

According to Gartner, the security provider maintained the No. 1 position, despite the company suffering its third consecutive year of revenue decline and its highest decline in revenue over a three-year period.

Symantec's security software revenue declined 6.2 percent to $3.4 billion. In 2015, 74 percent of its revenue came from the consumer and endpoint protection platform (EPP) categories.

Gartner also revealed that the worldwide security software market grew 3.7% in 2015 and the revenue totaled $22.1 billion in 2015, a huge increase from 2014.

Security information and event management remained the fastest-growing segment in the same year (2015), with 15.8% growth, while consumer security software showed the sharpest decline at 5.9% year on year.

Gartner state that the top five vendors together accounted for 37.6% of the security software revenue market share, down 3.1 percentage points from 2014.

The rest of the market grew strongly at 9.2% year on year.

"The below-market growth seen by these large vendors with complex product portfolios is in contrast to the market growth and disruption being introduced by smaller, more specialised security software vendors," says Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Much like Symantec, Intel's security software revenue also declined in 2015, with revenue falling 4.1% to $1.75 billion. Gartner reports that the decline in consumer EPP markets contributed in large part to Intel's revenue decline.

It turns out that IBM was the only one out of the top five vendors to show growth, with its revenue growing 2.5% to $1.45 billion in 2015.

For Gartner clients, a more detailed report and analysis is available here.