News

Quarterly Report: Cisco Retains SD-WAN Market Lead, VMware Slips Further

• By David Ramel
• 09/15/2021

Research firm Dell'Oro Group, which tracks the software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) market on a quarterly basis, said Cisco retained its market share lead in the Q2 2022 report, but there was some movement among the rest of the top five vendors.

The ranking comes in the mid-year 2021 SD-WAN & Enterprise Router Quarterly Report, wherein VMware and Fortinet switched places from the Q1 2022 report.

The top five ranking for the second quarter is: Cisco, Fortinet, VMware, Versa, and HPE Aruba.

The top five ranking for the first quarter is: Cisco, VMware, Fortinet, Versa, and HPE/Silver Peak.

In the Q3 2020 report, Cisco took over the No. 1 position from VMware, so the latter has fallen two spots since mid-2020.

Overall, the worldwide SD-WAN market grew 39 percent over the first half of 2022 compared to the prior year. The market grew 32 percent over all of 2020, which was about half of the 2019 rate, reflecting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Demand for SD-WAN solutions was robust in the first half of the year, sustaining the momentum we saw at the backend of last year," said VP Shin Umeda in a news release. "The SD-WAN market continues to expand globally, and while all regions posted solid double-digit growth, uptake in Europe and Asia was especially strong."

Other highlights of the for-pay report include:

• The top six SD-WAN vendors garnered more than 70 percent market share for the first half of 2021.
• Vendors are increasingly leveraging security functionality to differentiate their SD-WAN solutions in this highly competitive market.
• The market for hardware-based Access Routers declined at a mid-single-digit rate during the first half of 2021, highlighting the market shift to software-based SD-WAN solutions.