Enterprise Demand Expected to Drive SD-WAN

Staying connected in today’s business environment is no longer a luxury. All employees need to have access to the corporate network in order to complete processes, collaborate with colleagues, provide customer service and so much more. For those enterprises with distributed branch locations, the WAN has often been the answer to keeping everything in motion, but functionality isn’t always ideal. This creates more demand for a better implementation, such as SD-WAN.

Software-defined WAN offers a cost-effective and simplified alternative to traditional connectivity. While innovation tends to be slower in the enterprise space, many are paying attention to the opportunities afforded with SD-WAN and marketers are responding in kind. With so much movement in place, Gartner (News - Alert), in a recent blog on the topic, predicted that by the end of 2019, 30 percent of enterprises will have SD-WAN in their branches. This is a significant jump, given that only 1 percent deployment is in place today.

For those giants that tend to move a little slower than others, SD-WAN may only be on the wish list for the IT department and not a priority for the CIO. But in such scenarios, the enterprise isn’t benefitting from the momentum. According to Gartner, the benefits are too compelling to ignore and the insertion point of a single branch to pilot is easily accomplished. To help the process along a little further, Gartner even published a shortlist of vendors that meet their criteria for deployment and operation, helping the enterprise cut through the hype and get with those companies that can actually deliver value.

The company’s Market Guide for SD-WAN offers a bit of other insight as well, such as the fact that enterprises are in the very early stages of implementing or piloting smaller production deployments, setting the stage for that projected growth. At the same time, the market is evolving very quickly with a number of different vendors entering the market, hoping to establish themselves as the dominate force. The enterprise has the opportunity to select from WAN specialists, networking vendors and even startups.

Given the prediction, we know the market will experience expansion in terms of vendors, but also look for contraction over the next five years. While many of the concepts supporting SD-WAN are not new, the technology does wrap the technologies together and presents them in a new and integrated offering. To be truly successful in enterprise environments, solutions must provide comprehensive functional support, integration with WAN and cloud services and broader support of edge devices. Those vendors able to meet the demand will see the benefits of the projected growth.