Gartner Report Highlights Different Vendor SD-WAN Strategies

Gartner released its first Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure a few weeks ago. The report identifies three vendors — VMware, Cisco and Silver Peak — as being in its “leadership” quadrant for SD-WAN, which is one of the hottest segments of the IT sector. Both VMware and Silver Peak expect that being a named an industry leader by Gartner will boost their SD-WAN sales efforts given the amount of influence Gartner continues to have with IT leaders. Cisco also stands to benefit, but as the dominant provider of routers it already has relationships with thousands of customers. The report also predicts that by 2023 more than 90 percent of WAN edge infrastructure refresh initiatives will be based on virtualized customer premises equipment (vCPE) platforms or SD-WAN software/appliances. Most IT leaders agree that enterprises need to replace legacy routers at the WAN edge. What’s surprising is that each of the companies identified as leaders by Gartner in its Magic Quadrant report has a very different strategy.