Sometimes, two negatives do make a positive. Gartner has avoided using the term UTM (that is, unified threat management) in our research because:

1. You can't (and wouldn't want to) manage threats.
2. UTM originally applied to products for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), but UTM has been recently co-opted by some enterprise security vendors under the guise of fresh marketing.
3. There is little evidence that many of the components in these platforms are integrated, much less "unified." Now, there is some promotion of the new acronym XTM (that is, eXtensible threat management) as a new generation of UTM. We're not referring to any product name, but the attempt to create a new and confusing acronym, and create another artificial market to size and make predictions about.

No matter what you call it, the arc of advancement of network security products for the SMB will continue: New threats will drive the development of new safeguards that will be included as an option in that same appliance. This is not true for the enterprise, where best-of-breed buying of point solutions will continue, with consolidation of products occurring in three places, aligned by buying center and safeguard profile (see "Introducing the Secure Web Gateway").

The next-generation firewall (NGFW) will serve the enterprise and combine firewall and IPS,; however, there will be no UTM for the enterprise (see "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls, 2H07"). We are already seeing SMB multifunction firewall vendors optimizing performance by assigning separate ASICs, emphasizing that the inspection tasks on content and network processing are very different (see "MarketScope for Multifunction Firewalls for Small and Midsize Businesses"). Even among SMBs, we are seeing little evidence that many are deploying network, content and e-mail processing in the same platform, usually leaving e-mail security to a separate product or service.