The latest figures from International Data Corp (or IDC) found that the SD-WAN infrastructure market will grow at a compound annual rate of 40.4% between 2017 and 2022, as demand for SD-WAN services grows.
SD-WAN deployments accelerated significantly in 2017, with revenue earned by SD-WAN infrastructure firms increasing by 83.3% compared with the previous year to reach $833 million. Cisco is still the largest in this space, partially down to its widely adopted routing technology. It also bought Viptela last year.
Other key players identified by IDC a part of its Worldwide SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast 2018-2022 are VMware, which snapped up VeloCloud in December 2017, Silver Peak, Riverbed, Aryaka, Nokia, and Versa Networks.
"The emergence of SD-WAN technology has been one of the fastest industry transformations we have seen in years. Organizations of all sizes are modernizing their Wide Area Networks to provide improved user experience for a range of cloud-enabled applications," said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure, IDC.
"Incumbent networking vendors have quickly realigned their routing and WAN optimization portfolios to take on the growing cadre of startups in this market. Enabled by a rapid uptake across the service provider domain, SD-WAN infrastructure will continue to grow rapidly in the coming years, providing a beachhead for other software-defined networking and security functions in the enterprise branch."
A recent panel, at the WAN Summit event in Frankfurt, heard how organisations need to get into the right mind-set to successfully integrate SD-WAN into modern work environments.
