The total security appliance market saw positive growth in both vendor revenue and unit shipments for the first quarter of 2018 (1Q18), according to new research from IDC.

The analyst says worldwide vendor revenues in the first quarter increased 14.3% year over year to $3.3 billion and shipments grew 18.9% year over year to 838,098 units.

Cisco remains the top performing vendor by revenue with $533 million in 1Q18, representing 16.43% market share.

Rounding out the top 5 vendors are Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, Fortinet and Symantec.

In terms of individual submarkets, the unified threat management (UTM) sub-market continues to drive overall growth, with UTM reaching record-high revenues of $2.1 billion in 1Q18 and year-over-year growth of 16.1%, the highest growth among all sub-markets.

The UTM market now represents more than 53% of worldwide revenues in the security appliance market.

Following UTM, both the firewall and content management sub-markets also had positive year-over-year revenue growth in 1Q18 with gains of 17.4% and 7.5%, respectively.

Meanwhile, the intrusion detection and prevention and virtual private network (VPN) sub-markets experienced weakening revenues in the quarter, with year-over-year declines of 13.0% and 3.0%, respectively.

IDC program director for security products Robert Ayoub says, "The first quarter of 2018 exhibited strong growth for network security due to consistent double-digit growth across nearly every region and continued momentum from UTM as vendors reported $240.6 million more in revenue for 1Q18 than in 1Q17.

“Firewall and UTM are the strongest areas of growth as network refreshes drive perimeter security refreshes and as vendors add new features and improve performance across all product lines."

The United States delivered 42.3% of the worldwide security appliance market revenue and was the major driver for spending in Q1 2018 with 16.7% year-over-year growth.

Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) (APeJ) had the strongest year-over-year revenue growth in 1Q18 at 15.9% and captured 21.0% revenue market share.

However, IDC says the more mature regions of the world – the United States and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) – combined to provide nearly two-thirds of the global security appliance market revenue.

Both regions had positive growth in the single-digit range. EMEA saw an annual increase of 11.6%. Asia/Pacific (including Japan)(APJ) and the Americas (Canada, Latin America, and the U.S.) experienced year-over-year growth of 13.1% and 16.3%, respectively.