SonicWALL Categorized as Champion by Leading Analyst Group

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SonicWALL, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNWL), a leading secure network infrastructure company, today announced that Info-Tech Research Group has placed the company's Network Security Appliance (NSA) and TZ series appliances in the Champion category of its latest Vendor Landscape report. The report, "Vendor Landscape: IT Security Appliances (SMB)", issued in January 2010, evaluates the top Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions. The SonicWALL TZ and NSA Series are grouped in the Champion category with IBM. The other vendors evaluated in the report include Cisco, Fortinet and WatchGuard.

"The top vendors in the SMB security market understand that the best IT security solutions have high-quality features, offer strong support, and are easy to install and simple to operate," the report states. "These UTM vendors have been evaluated across five key criteria and grouped into four categories: Champions, Contenders, Old Guard and the Vanguard. These are not rankings. Rather, the groupings articulate how well suited each vendor and product is to servicing the target market of small and mid-sized organizations."

SonicWALL's NSA Series appliances apply next-generation UTM against a comprehensive array of attacks, combining intrusion prevention, anti-virus and anti-spyware with the application-level control of SonicWALL Application Firewall. With advanced routing, stateful high-availability and high-speed VPN technology, the NSA series adds security, reliability, functionality and productivity to branch offices, central sites and distribute mid-enterprise networks, while minimizing cost and complexity.

The SonicWALL TZ Series offers revolutionary breakthroughs with higher performance protection, new redundancy capabilities, enterprise-class Anti-Spam integration, application inspection, and other innovations to protect and improve the efficiency of distributed enterprises and small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs).

"It's recognitions like this from third-party industry thought leaders such as Info-Tech Research Group that help solidify SonicWALL's place as being on the cutting edge of the UTM industry," said Patrick Sweeney, vice president, product management for SonicWALL. "SonicWALL continues to work hard in providing increased value to our SMB and Mid-Tier customers through the innovation of our NSA series appliances."

About SonicWALL, Inc.

SonicWALL, Inc. the leader in network security, focuses on developing solutions that remove the cost and complexity out of managing a secure network environment. With over one million award-winning appliances shipped through its global network of ten thousand channel partners, SonicWALL provides end-to-end solutions including Firewalls, SSL VPNs, Email Security and Continuous Data Protection that collectively ensure robust, secure network protection. For more information, visit the company web site at http://www.sonicwall.com/.

About Info-Tech Research Group

With a paid membership of over 21,000 worldwide, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) is a global leader in providing tactical, practical Information Technology research and analysis. Info-Tech has been addressing the needs of IT professionals for over 10 years, and is one of North America's fastest growing full-service IT analyst firms.

Safe Harbor Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this press release are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements include but are not limited to statements regarding the functional benefits associated with the SonicWALL NSA and TZ series offerings. These forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the time the statements are made and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. In addition, please see the "Risk Factors" described in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2008, for a more detailed description of the risks facing our business. All forward-looking statements included in this release are based upon information available to SonicWALL as of the date of the release, and we assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statement.

NOTE: SonicWALL is a registered trademark of SonicWALL, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE SonicWALL, Inc.