MetTel, AT&T, Verizon Land in Latest Gartner Magic Quadrant

Gartner recognized top network services providers in its newest leaderboard.

MetTel’s Ed Fox

The research firm recently unveiled the Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services. The report focuses on providers that deliver network operations center life cycle services. These companies assume responsibility for operating WAN, LAN and WLAN networks.

A U.S. firm stood out among its peers in the inaugural study. New York-based MetTel joined Microland and Wipro of Inda in the “Leaders” quadrant. Gartner praised all three for their automation capabilities.

MetTel chief technology officer Ed Fox said the recognition validates MetTel’s emphasis on customer experience.

“It is our belief that this Gartner Magic Quadrant is the culmination of many years of investment in channel relationships, talent acquisition, and system and infrastructure development,” Fox said.

Source: Gartner

Verizon, Optanix, Hughes Network Systems and NTT slotted into the “Challengers” quadrant. These companies have demonstrated “sustained execution” but may lack as complete an offering as the visionaries. Or Gartner may not favorably view their go-to-market strategy or brand awareness. For example, Gartner praised the “very mature” Optanix platform but listed the company’s size (just 300 employees) and “uncommonly channel-partner-heavy” service delivery model as concerns. Optanix generates 80% of its revenue from the channel, according to Gartner.

The firm listed BT, AT&T and IBM in the “Niche Players” quadrant. No companies landed in the “Visionary” quadrant.

Trends

Gartner included several insights in its report. For example, it expects 60% of enterprises to deploy SD-WAN by 2024. Three-fifths of those companies will also adopt secure access service edge (SASE) architecture. That would be a 25-point uptick from 2018.

An increasingly popular aspect of managed network services that customers are demanding from providers are “real-time, network-synchronized configuration management database capabilities.”

Other Gartner observations include:

• BT offers the best site coverage for European customers, compared to other Magic Quadrant vendors.
• Wipro serves the biggest managed network services customer base in Asia Pacific.
• Hughes registered the “most complete” customer satisfaction framework relative to MNS.
• NTT performed best in terms of its SLAs’ “breadth and depth.”

We recently covered Gartner’s UCaaS Magic Quadrant. We also covered the packed WAN Edge Magic Quadrant in late September.