The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) infrastructure market is hotting up with 40.4 per cent growth forecast until 2022, reaching US$4.5 billion within the next four years.
According to IDC research, the battle for supremacy will be contested by a select group of vendors, chiefly Cisco, VMware, Silver Peak and Riverbed.
“The emergence of SD-WAN technology has been one of the fastest industry transformations we have seen in years,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure at IDC.
“Organisations of all sizes are modernising their WAN to provide improved user experience for a range of cloud-enabled applications.”
From an industry standpoint, SD-WAN infrastructure revenues increased 83.3 per cent in 2017 to reach US$833 million.
Mehra said the market has also become “increasingly competitive”, with traditional networking vendors looking to M&A strategies to complement existing offerings or gain a foothold in this rapidly-expanding market.
Specifically, IDC found that Cisco holds the largest share of the SD-WAN infrastructure market, fuelled by its “extensive routing portfolio” that is used in SD-WAN deployments, as well as its Meraki offering and its August 2017 acquisition of Viptela.
VMware, which in December 2017 purchased VeloCloud, holds the second largest market share in the SD-WAN infrastructure market, followed by Silver Peak, Riverbed, Aryaka, Nokia and Versa.
“Incumbent networking vendors have quickly realigned their routing and WAN optimisation portfolios to take on the growing cadre of start-ups in this market,” Mehra added.
“Enabled by a rapid uptake across the service provider domain, SD-WAN infrastructure will continue to grow rapidly in the coming years, providing a beachhead for other software-defined networking and security functions in the enterprise branch.”
