[GOLD]
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition
Cisco Systems

While this was a very tight race, Cisco, the leader in networking infrastructure, took top honors from readers in this category. Building on its existing technology expertise, readers were especially pleased with ASA 5500's ability to effectively block intrusions, attacks and unauthorized traffic and its vendor service and support.

[SILVER]
FireWall-1
Check Point Software Technologies

As pioneers in the commercial firewall market, Check Point came in a close second with its FireWall-1 product. Readers were particularly pleased with the products centralized management and its logging, monitoring and reporting capabilities. Their users also felt the product adequately protected their ...

[BRONZE]
McAfee Enterprise Firewall
McAfee

McAfee, another leader in the security market fared very well with its Enterprise Firewall, formerly Secure Computing's Sidewinder firewall. In particular it scored high marks for its centralized management capabilities and its ability to block threat. Users were also generally pleased with its ease of installation, vendor support and ROI.

[TRENDS]
"There is some innovation with firewall-plus solutions that bring together firewalling with some IDPS functions. The network firewall market continues to move towards multifunction/purpose specific firewall usage such as Web application firewalls, database firewalls and the virtual machine-aware firewalls." -- Diana Kelley, partner, SecurityCurve