The analyst predicts big tech shifts within the sector in the next four to five years
Gartner’s has renamed its annual Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure report as the Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN. Cisco, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Aruba, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks and VMware all held onto their leadership status from last year.
When the first report on the subject was published in 2018, Gartner assessed 20 providers, this year’s version is down to 14, which reflects consolidation in the market as it matures. Forcepoint was included for the first time, in the niche players quadrant while two companies formerly designated as niche players, Riverbed and Fat Pipe were dropped.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50% of new SD-WAN purchases will be part of a single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) offering, a steep rise from just 10% in 2022. It also reckons that by 2026, 30% of new SD-WAN procurements will be in some form of network as a service (NaaS) up from close to 0% in 2022 this year.