Demand for SD-WAN in Enterprise Market Escalates
SD-WAN deployments are “exploding” in the enterprise market with adoption expected to accelerate quickly.
That’s according to the latest Kable Global ICT Customer Insight study. Of more than 2,600 enterprises across all regions, nearly three-fifths (58.4 percent) plan to adopt SD-WAN within the next two years.
Mike Fratto, Current Analysis research director, tells Channel Partners that SD-WAN is still in the early stages of adoption but “it has a very powerful set of capabilities for enterprises that have a large number of branches to manage, so the growth is a testament to the benefit of SD-WAN and shows pent-up demand for more versatile branch network interconnectivity.” Current Analysis is affiliated with Kable.
This demand is being met by a “vibrant” supplier market segment made up of numerous startups and established vendors – with more products coming to market – that offer competitive products and services for the enterprise either directly or through VARs and MSPs, according to the study.
“SD-WAN is poised to rocket in the same way WAN optimization took off in the mid-2000s,” Fratto said. “The benefits enterprises gain with SD-WAN are enormous and address a number of pain points enterprises face with remote and branch office WAN connectivity.”{ad}
Masergy Communications on Tuesday announced Managed SD-WAN is the latest addition to its Managed Network f(n) family of fully managed network functions.
“Today’s dynamic information technology environment requires enterprises to be more agile as they expand operations, introduce new applications and migrate to public clouds — all while continuously optimizing costs,” said Tim Naramore, Masergy’s CTO. “These factors are driving the need for more intelligent use of broadband Internet connectivity in global hybrid network architectures.”
And last month, Janet Schijns, vice president of global channels for Verizon Enterprise, said the carrier has added an SD-WAN incremental market development fund (MDF) budget for its partners.
Having a variety of SD-WAN choices is beneficial for enterprises because they can match their needs with product capabilities to find the best fit, and they can push vendors to add or enhance capabilities, Fratto said. However, offering those choices makes competing for enterprise and MSP customers more difficult for vendors, he said.
Complicating matters is that most MSPs are basing their SD-WAN managed services on …
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… one or more commercial products and adding value by simplifying the operational life cycle for the product deployment, integrating multiple services and reducing capital outlay for enterprises.
“For the channel, most SD-WAN vendors are actively implementing integration APIs that partners, like service providers and MSPs, can use to implement SD-WAN as a managed service,” Fratto said. “Channel partners can use the APIs as an onramp to offer their own SD-WAN service. Some SD-WAN vendors like VeloCloud and Viptela also have cloud-management services, in addition to on-premises management, that the channel can use to kick-start a managed SD-WAN service without the upfront costs associated with launching a managed service. Both vendors offer extensive APIs to integrate the cloud management services with their own portals.”
Current Analysis’ SD-WAN product assessments evaluate the competitive positioning of SD-WAN products. The initial round of competitive products includes Cisco’s IWAN, Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Network Services, VeloCloud Networks’ Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN, Versa Networks and Viptela’s Secure Extensible Network.
Current Analysis will be adding six more vendors in the second half of 2016. All product assessments are updated semi-annually and reflect the current state of the competitive landscape, along with analysis of product and industry trends as they occur.
