Accelerated by enterprise network spending, sales of Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) solutions rose 45% year over year for the third calendar quarter of 2021.
Cisco is the market segment’s revenue leader, followed by Fortinet and VMware. Those are some of the conclusions of the Dell’Oro Group’s 3Q 2021 SD-WAN Report. With global supply chains disruptions afoot software has an advantage, said Shin Umeda, vice president at Dell’Oro Group.
“Because SD-WAN is software-based technology, the global supply chain disruptions have had less of an effect compared to hardware-based networking products,” Umeda said.
The report shows continued consolidations around market leaders. Six vendors — including those above — accounted for 69% market share in the third quarter. Dell’Oro noted that Cisco’s quarterly SD-WAN revenue nearly doubled in the quarter, with especially strong growth in North America.
The report also tracked quarterly revenue growth for the first time in two years for hardware-based access routers, devices that securely connect remote sites.
SD-WAN offerings expand
Expect SD-WAN sales to continue to accelerate, if recent news is any indication. AWS in December introduced AWS Cloud WAN, its solution to replace a pre-existing “patchwork” into an integrated AWS dashboard. AWS Cloud WAN connects on-prem data centers, branch offices and cloud resources together on AWS’ global backbone. Customers gain private network control and management through a central dashboard. AWS Cloud WAN users can issue network policies to build and manage their global networks.
AWS’s announcement happened the same week that Verizon Business announced a new managed SD-WAN service of its own. Verizon announced a Cisco-based managed service as part of Verizon Business’s Network as a Service (NaaS) digitization strategy. The goal of the service is to deliver cloud security and 5G capabilities to businesses with reduced complexity, it said.
The Verizon/Cisco offering comprises Managed Cisco SD-WAN for the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms Family, Integrated Services Router (ISR) 1000 and 4000 integration, Cisco Umbrella security framework, Duo zero-trust security support and Thousand Eyes for network observability.
Verizon and Cisco previously collaborated earlier in 2021 to offer three new SD-WAN managed services. The expansion included two offerings supported by Viptela, the SD-WAN provider that Cisco acquired in 2017. Those include the co-managed Cisco SD-WAN that allows for the control and self-management of SD-WAN security and application policies; and the managed SD-WAN for the Cisco ISR1100 Series platform that is designed for smaller branch office deployments.
