SD-WAN market revenue surpassed $2 billion last year, reaching its highest level, according to Dell’Oro Group.

The telecommunications research group unveiled its SD-WAN and Enterprise Router Quarterly Report, which showed a 35% growth in SD-WAN revenue last year. Cisco led market share for all of 2021, followed by Fortinet, VMware, Versa Networks and HPE.

“Demand for SD-WAN solutions picked up in 2021 as enterprises continued to optimize their branch network architectures for the cloud services and workloads they are implementing,” Del’Oro vice president Shin Umeda said.

Umeda said COVID-19 impacted both the short-term and long-term growth of SD-WAN.

Dell’Oro’s Shin Umeda

“The pandemic created pent-up demand that boosted the market growth in 2021, but it also drove companies to evaluate and adopt SD-WAN for a more distributed work force,” he said.

Market Diversity

Dell’Oro revealed an interesting statistic: eight SD-WAN vendors earned more than 80% of market revenue in 2021.

Robert DeVita, founder and CEO of Mejeticks, said his partner firm focuses on a smaller handful of vendors: VMware, Fortinet, Cisco Meraki and Cato Networks. Moreover, DeVita differentiated between the technology provider and the service provider whose offerings Mejetick sells.

Mejeticks’ Robert Devita

“We attempt to pick the underlying SD-WAN technology first, then go to market for MSPs to support it,” DeVita told Channel Futures. “Segmenting the decision process through this process allows you to get the best SD-WAN technology and the MSP. It also allows the customer to more clearly view best of breed vendors without confusing the process.”

SD-WAN, Security and SASE

Jenne’s Shawn Berry

Dell’Oro also noted that many vendors are converging SD-WAN with network security technologies. For example, security vendors like Palo Alto Networks have bought pure-play SD-WAN vendors such as CloudGenix and launched a converged secure access service edge (SASE) platform.

Shawn Berry is senior vice president of global cloud channel sales for distributor and tech solutions brokerage Jenne. Berry said more customers and partners want to wrap security around SD-WAN solutions.

“Selling multiple products like UCaaS and network only make that additional add-in of SD-WAN and security an easier bolt-on. On top of all the benefits of SD-WAN, it adds the opportunity and is far less intrusive to add in security,” Berry told Channel Futures. “Converged SASE has only accelerated this conversation because it reinforces security and networking convergence.”

In addition, Dell’Oro reported that hardware-based access routers are still declining in popularity.