Gartner Magic Quadrant for Firewalls November 2008

We' ve been looking at the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant in the office this last few days as we have a few customers looking at new firewalls. We've been selling the three market leaders for some time now, Checkpoint, Cisco and Juniper. We don't consider the others left in the market as being very serious offerings and view them as second division vendors and products, (this would include the Fortinet, and Astaro and Sonicwall) in fact I wouldn't use any of those on my own broadband at home ! They might be cheap, but they aren't particularly cheerful ! Why an enterprise customer would want to risk cutting corners with them is beyond me really. As my Dad used to say, "use the right tool for the job, and don't buy cheap tools". The sad part about it is a lot of customers are simply buying on price at the moment, and aren't looking into the bigger picture of this kind of purchase, e.g long term support, quality of support, ease of use, integration with the rest of their estate, are they 'best of breed ?'. Enterprise Network Firewalls aren't quite a commodity yet, but the buying of them shouldn't be treated in the same way you buy a laptop and PC....on price.