Name Change

Gartner’s four-year-old Magic Quadrant For WAN Edge Infrastructure report has a new, simplified name this year: The Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN.

But what hasn’t changed was this year’s six quadrant Leaders that all held on to their top positions. Cisco, a Leader last year and Challenger in 2019, retained its seat on this year’s quadrant. The security players also secured top spots on the report, while standalone SD-WAN-turned-SASE specialist Versa once again held onto its Leader title.

The first Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure published in 2018 included 20 providers, while this year’s report listed 14 as the market consolidates. Joining the quadrant this year was Forcepoint, which landed in the Niche Players quadrant. Left off this year’s report compared to last years were two former Niche Players: Riverbed and Fat Pipe, for failure to meet the inclusion criteria for adoption and failure to meet the inclusion criteria for the market momentum index defined by Gartner for this Magic Quadrant, respectively.

Gartner said that by 2025, 50 percent of new SD-WAN purchases will be part of a single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) offering, which will be a substantial bump up from 10 percent in 2022. By 2026, 30 percent of new SD-WAN procurements will be in some form of network as a service (NaaS) -- a major increase from near 0 percent in 2022, according to Gartner.

The 2022 report saw a maturing and mainstream SD-WAN market with both large, established vendors and smaller providers. Here’s who made this year’s Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN.