Fortinet Claims 21,000 SD-WAN Customers, Challenging Cisco

Security specialist Fortinet claims more than 21,000 organizations have chosen its software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) solution. That's news because Cisco Systems -- the acknowledged leader in many networking/virtualization market niches -- claimed only more than 20,000 SD-WAN solution customers in a Nov. 26 blog post. With Cisco ranking No 1 in a SD-WAN equipment market share report published by Gartner around the same time, it's clear that Fortinet is challenging Cisco and other market leaders for SD-WAN supremacy. "Fortinet delivers full-featured SD-WAN via the FortiGate next-generation firewall, and today Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has emerged as one of the top solutions on the market to support enterprises in their pursuit of reducing WAN complexity and cost while enhancing application experience and security," the company said in a Dec. 17, 2019, statement. "To support large enterprises, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN is able to scale to up to 100,000 SD-WAN sites thanks to Fortinet's 20-year investment in building single-pane-of-glass management, which can now support the most demanding use cases for both security and SD-WAN."