WatchGuard touts "first" UTM product to resellers

WatchGuard Technologies has announced a new firewall solution that it is billing as the first self-configuring security appliance for the unified threat management (UTM) industry.

RapidDeploy is a cloud-based configuration utility designed to reduce the total cost of ownership on WatchGuard devices by eliminating the need for on-site manual provisioning by an IT security professional.

"RapidDeploy is a means to drop-ship appliances to site and then using the serial number, pre-configure on a cloud-based sever," explained WatchGuard's freshly-minted regional director, Pat Devlin.

"So out-of-the-box the firewall turns itself on and looks for the RapidDeploy server and then just downloads the config. It's a really good thing for multi-site deployments as well as recovery."

The configuration data can be created and stored on a combination of private of public clouds, depending on the requirements of the customer.

"All the technology to make it active on a public cloud is also usable on a private cloud,"  Devlin said.

"So, for service providers who say 'we want to not only be able to help you deploy rapidly, but we want to install lots of backup configs,' they can run their own private deployment server and offer that as a service to the end user as well."

RapidDeploy marks the first of what would be several cloud-based products and solutions released by WatchGuard in the coming year, Devlin said.

RapidDeploy will be released via WatchGuard's Fireware XTM update, which is expected to be widely available "in the first few months" of 2013.   

Growth in the middle

WatchGuard Technologies is coming off a bumper financial year that saw the company return double-digit growth for the seventh successive quarter.

"It's been a record quarter for Australia and New Zealand where we've just done our most revenue ever," Devlin said. "In particular, our New Zealand business is really booming; we've more than doubled our business in the last year there."

Moving forward, Devlin said WatchGuard would pursue further inroads into the "middle space" which it sees as the biggest available market.

"What we're trying to do is reach into that next market tier up. The analysis of the UTM market says [the mid tier] is about triple the size of the top and the bottom end," Devlin said.

"That's the space we want to grow and in fact, all our growth is already coming from there via our 5 and 8 Series products. But we're spending a lot of effort reinforcing our position in that space."