Research Says Cisco, Microsoft Lead Security Spending

The continued push into the security sector by IT leaders Cisco Systems and Microsoft is making hay with chief security officers, as a new poll of the executives finds that most will consider the well-known vendors’ products in 2006 as they budget network and applications defense technologies.

In its inaugural survey of ranking CSOs at 50 Fortune 1000 companies in the United States, New York-based Citigroup Investment Research found that 32 percent of the IT leaders said they plan to increase their security budgets this year, while 54 percent said they expect to maintain their current level of spending.

Those spending patterns closely resemble the same executives’ budgeting plans for 2005, according to the research.

Only six percent of the CSOs interviewed by the investment bank’s research arm said they will lower their technology budgets in 2006.

Among the companies most frequently referenced by the CSOs for planned spending during the year were Cisco in the networking security space, and Microsoft, a relative newcomer, in the applications arena.

While Cisco has been marketing firewall technologies and other network-oriented security tools for almost a decade, Microsoft has only entered the applications market in the last year with several stand-alone products.

The software giant is further expected to have an effect on the anti-virus market with the launch of its next-generation Windows operating system, known as Vista, scheduled to arrive sometime in 2007.

The new Microsoft OS will offer onboard anti-spyware and anti-phishing applications, among other tools, in the name of eliminating the need for some aftermarket Windows security products.

According to Citigroup, some 64 percent of the CSOs interviewed said they plan to buy applications from security software vendors, while 33 percent said they are planning to purchase security products from companies that specialize primarily in data networking technology.

While only 33 percent of the executives interviewed said they prefer to buy from data networking vendors, 44 out of the 50 respondents said they have made at least some security purchases from Cisco.

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