But Miguel Perez, general manager of Santiago, Chile-based software development firm Novared SA, said that large companies are still better off using best-of-breed products. He added that suites of commodity security offerings likely make sense only for small and midsize businesses.

"For big companies, the cost of best-of-breed technologies is not significant compared to what they are risking" by moving away from them, Perez said. And that won't change until vendors start delivering better management capabilities for dealing with integrated security products, he said.