Standalone appliances still dominate the DPI market, but that trend could soon start to change, according to a new Heavy Reading report

Craig Matsumoto, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

November 26, 2009

2 Min Read
DPI Vendors Eye Integration

The deep packet inspection (DPI) market is dominated by standalone appliances, but integration fever is going to start spreading soon, according to a recent report.

By now, every major vendor with DPI technology has introduced some kind of integrated platform, analyst Simon Sherrington writes in Heavy Reading's Deep Packet Inspection Market Tracker.

Examples he cites include Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR), and Nokia Networks .

And there's more going on than just packing DPI into a router. "Aside from integration within routers/GGSNs, etc., there is also a trend toward tighter integration of the DPI with subscriber management systems," Sherrington writes.

Even so, sales of integrated DPI represented just less than 2 percent of the market in 2008, the report finds. But by 2014, Sherrington expects integrated sales to account for 32 percent of a $1.17 billion market.

That total represents a compound annual growth rate of 18.7 percent, starting from a market size of $418 million in 2008.

The market for standalone DPI appliances will continue to grow but will have leveled off by 2014, at about $791 million, Sherrington writes.

Vendors in the appliance category include Allot Ltd. (Nasdaq: ALLT) and Arbor Networks , which acquired Ellacoya. (See Arbor & Ellacoya Team Up.) Sandvine Inc. is another appliance vendor, but starting in June 2008, it began teaming up with companies such as Netsweeper Inc. and PeerApp Ltd. to offer pre-integrated packages -- Sandvine's DPI plus PeerApp's peer-to-peer caching applicances, for instance.

(It should be noted that the report goes beyond just DPI to include traffic analyzers that study flows or traffic behavior. Those technologies don't crack open packets the way DPI does, but they're put to the same purpose of managing traffic in real time, particularly when DPI-defeating encryption is involved.)

Growth in the overall DPI market continues to be driven by a need to keep peer-to-peer traffic in check. But service providers are also seeing an increased need for DPI as part of a policy management strategy, as was evidenced in the recent Light Reading virtual tradeshow, Policy Control and Deep Packet Inspection. (See Policy Matters to Mobile Broadband Operators.) That's particularly true in the mobile world, which highlights another point in the Market Tracker report: Mobile operators will account for 49 percent of the DPI market, by revenues, in 2014, compared with 12 percent today.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading

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Craig Matsumoto

Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

Yes, THAT Craig Matsumoto – who used to be at Light Reading from 2002 until 2013 and then went away and did other stuff and now HE'S BACK! As Editor-in-Chief. Go Craig!!

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