I am not responsible for the development part of my company, and it is our headquarters in the US that decided to opt for Cisco NGIPS. Initially, in our company, we used Cisco ASA and then Cisco NGIPS.

We also looked at Sourcefire.

They bought this particular one from Sourcefire and Sourcefire was the world leader in next-generation IPS before Cisco bought it and I know it wasn't just in terms of visibility and how much it can do but in terms of cost too because it was an open-source project that was going on before Cisco bought it. Cisco bought the enterprise version so I feel it's not expensive, but I've not really checked the licensing cost.

McAfee and Palo Alto were on our shortlist.

I have compared Fortinet FortiGate IPS against Cisco NGIPS.

We looked at several: Imperva, Check Point, Juniper, Sophos, and SourceNET.

I have evaluated Palo Alto in the past.

The company is Cisco oriented and Cisco is a leader in security Gartner Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls.