News

SD-WAN Research Shows Cisco Domination

• By David Ramel
• 07/25/2019

A new report on the software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) space shows Cisco dominates the growing infrastructure market.

The SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast from research firm IDC shows that the market will grow at a 30.8 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2018 to 2023 to reach $5.25 billion.

Getting the largest slice of that pie, by far, will be Cisco if 2018 numbers showing it with 46.4 percent market share are any indication.

The networking giant has been active in the burgeoning SD-WAN space, which has exploded as the software-defined networking (SDN) movement matures, providing a point of entry into the enterprise for the new software-centric technologies.

For example, it recently teamed up with Orange for software-defined LANs and entered a pact with Tata to simplify enterprise networking.

In May, the company offered CoLocation bundling for SD-WAN branches.

"IDC finds that Cisco holds the largest share of the SD-WAN infrastructure market, fueled by its extensive routing portfolio that is used in SD-WAN deployments, as well as its Meraki portfolio and its SD-WAN management platform powered by technology it acquired from Viptela in August 2017," said IDC in a news release hawking its for-pay report.

Following Cisco are VMware, Silver Peak, Nokia-Nuage and Riverbed.

"SD-WAN continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market, driven by a variety of factors. First, traditional enterprise WANs are increasingly not meeting the needs of today's modern digital businesses, especially as it relates to supporting SaaS apps and multi- and hybrid-cloud usage," said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure. "Second, enterprises are interested in easier management of multiple connection types across their WAN to improve application performance and end-user experience. Combined with the rapid embrace of SD-WAN by leading communications service providers globally, these trends continue to drive deployments of SD-WAN, providing enterprises with dynamic management of hybrid WAN connections and the ability to guarantee high levels of quality of service on a per-application basis."