1/12/2010 -- Last year was a rough one for network access control (NAC) appliance players, which means it was a particularly rough year for Cisco Systems Inc.

Cisco is far and away the biggest purveyor of NAC appliances, according to market watcher Infonetics Research. As a result, Cisco -- more than any other NAC appliance vendor -- felt the double-headed impact of both a challenging economic climate and a fast-morphing NAC landscape.

"The NAC enforcement appliance market was impacted squarely by the financial services meltdown and suffered a prolonged downturn as Cisco," by far the largest vendor in the space, "saw large decreases in security revenue through the first half of 2009," said Jeff Wilson, a principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research.

A larger issue, Wilson said, involves the changing economics of the NAC landscape itself.

"[W]hile there is still strong fundamental demand for NAC technology, many companies are looking for NAC functionality to be included in infrastructure purchases, or to solve NAC problems with software or management, shifting some of the opportunity away from the discrete standalone appliance market," he said.

That said, Wilson and Infonetics concede, the traditional NAC appliance isn't going anywhere. True, NAC appliance revenues did dip between Q2 and Q3 of 2009, slipping to $37 million, but NAC revenues are expected to recover in Q4.

What's more, Infonetics projects, NAC appliances should record double-digit growth through "at least" 2013. --Stephen Swoyer