IDC: SD-WAN Spending Forecast Highlights Growing Carrier Opportunity
Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) spending will grow significantly over the next five years, according to an SD-WAN spending forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC). The SD-WAN infrastructure market will grow at an estimated 30.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2018 to 2023 to reach $5.25 billion, researchers said.
In a report looking at market share, IDC reported that the SD-WAN infrastructure market continues to be highly competitive with sales increasing 64.9% in 2018 to $1.37 billion, dominated by incumbent networking vendors. The legacy companies have leveraged their technological strengths and their installed base of routing and WAN optimization technology, according to the researchers.
IDC research found that Cisco holds the largest share of the SD-WAN infrastructure market, fueled by its extensive routing portfolio that is used in SD-WAN deployments, with an additional boost from its Meraki portfolio and its SD-WAN management platform based on technology it acquired from Viptela in August 2017.
In second place was VMware, with its SD-WAN service powered by VeloCloud (which VMware acquired in December 2017), followed by Silver Peak, Nokia-Nuage, and Riverbed.
“SD-WAN continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market, driven by a variety of factors. First, traditional enterprise WANs are increasingly not meeting the needs of today’s modern digital businesses, especially as it relates to supporting SaaS apps and multi- and hybrid-cloud usage. Second, enterprises are interested in easier management of multiple connection types across their WAN to improve application performance and end-user experience,” said Rohit Mehra, IDC vice president, Network Infrastructure, in a prepared statement. “Combined with the rapid embrace of SD-WAN by leading communications service providers globally, these trends continue to drive deployments of SD-WAN, providing enterprises with dynamic management of hybrid WAN connections and the ability to guarantee high levels of quality of service on a per-application basis.”