Richard Stiennon wants to know if your UTM is a mutt

Another view on UTM's and Symantec's withdrawal from this market comes from Rich Stiennon in his Threat Chaos blog:

Is your UTM a Mutt? by ZDNet's Richard Stiennon -- I have a problem with the idea of Universal Threat Management appliances. Leaving aside the horrible terminology (Who wants to manage threats? Don’t you want to block them and forget about them?) the question that I always ask is: If best-of-breed is the standard for large enterprises why would it be good practice [...]

Richard brings up the point I have always wondered about.  If big companies want best-of-breed, why should smaller companies settle for less than that?  It just doesn't make sense to me.  Mike Rothman , in his big is small theory, says that customers are willing to put up with less than best of breed by getting it all from one big vendor.  But some of the "pile them high" UTM's are not big companies.  Astaro, Fortinet, Baracuda are not exactly Cisco, Symantec or McAfee. However, they are all grabbing market share with UTM's that do not offer best of breed applications. On top of this, Symantec's recent announcement of pulling out of the appliance UTM market makes me wonder, is big the next small in UTM? Maybe not, it seems. 

On the other hand Chris Hoff, my friend at Crossbeam will tell you that a big part of their value prop is offering best of breed applications in their UTM.  So what is the answer here.  Is the SME market willing to put up with less functionality from smaller vendors, but enterprises want  best of breed from big companies.  Can our security needs really be that divergent?  I think Richard Stiennon is dead on, this market is ripe for MSSPs to come in and deliver this type of product as a service to make them all happy.