Here's Who Made Gartner's Magic Quadrant For Application Delivery Controllers

App-Centric Buyers Accelerating Growth In ADC Market

Application delivery controllers are playing a bigger role in the enterprise and cloud data centers as the market demand rises. ADCs are a key component in improving availability, scalability, security and performance of applications, and are undergoing a market transition, said Andrew Lerner, research director at Gartner, who co-wrote Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for ADCs."

"There's increasing influence from app-centric buyers who have a completely different set of expectations and requirements vs. traditional infrastructure buyers," said Lerner in an interview with CRN. "The 'traditional' side of the market will grow moderately, but we anticipate much higher growth rates from the app-centric buyers."

Lerner said app-centric personnel are influencing ADC selections, which is accelerating innovation in the market.

Defining Gartner's ADC Market

Gartner defines ADCs as providing functions that optimize delivery of enterprise applications across the network. The controllers offer functionality for both user-to-application and application-to-application traffic, and effectively bridge the gap between the application and underlying protocols and traditional packet-based networks, according to Garner.

Lerner said security is also a major factor that is fueling growth. "ADCs are increasingly being used to better secure the application and often delivered via ADC vendors," he said.

ADC Research Methodology

A total of 10 vendors made the 2015 Magic Quadrant, representing the biggest companies in the market that provide support and solutions around ADCs.

The Magic Quadrant ranks unified communications vendors on their ability to execute,and completeness of vision. Gartner places vendors into four categories: Niche Players (low on vision and execution), Visionaries (good vision but low execution), Challengers (good execution but low vision) and Leaders (excelling in both vision and execution).

Leader: F5 Networks

The Seattle-based vendor continues to dominate the market, owning approximately 52 percent of share in 2014. F5 is ranked No. 1 in both vision and execution on the quadrant.

"They have deep expertise and product capabilities in complicated enterprise environments and [have] responded to market changes effectively through the years," said Lerner.

F5 benefited from a year of its new software bundling offerings -- Good, Better, Best -- that resulted in 70 percent of customers buying the "Best" offering, according to Gartner. The vendor also introduced its Silverline cloud-based offering and is leveraging its 2013 acquisition of LineRate to help fight off lower-cost or open-source offerings.

F5 Networks

Strengths: F5's Silverline cloud-based services include capabilities for cloud-resident ADC offerings that will be increasingly important to support new application traffic patterns, said Lerner. A clear differentiator with F5 is its internal knowledge, extensive platforms and experience understanding complex and customized environments.

Cautions: Gartner said clients and survey results confirm that F5 is the highest-priced provider in the market. In addition the company's APIs, scripting and integration capabilities often result in a series of lock-in features for customers.

"F5 needs to win the hearts of the emerging app-centric buyer who currently prefers non-traditional ADC offerings like Elastic Load Balancing from Amazon or open-source offerings like HAProxy or Nginx," said Lerner.

Leader: Radware

The Israel-based vendor is a longtime player in the market with more than 7,000 paying customers of mostly larger enterprises and service providers. Radware is ranked No. 2 in both execution and vision on the quadrant.

"From a product perspective, they can go toe to toe with F5 from a feature and deployment perspective, which no other ADC vendor can do," said Lerner. "They need to increase their brand visibility and grow their routes to market. Despite having product capabilities similar to F5, they show up much less in conversations with our clients."

Radware grew more than double the market rate in 2014 and currently owns 9 percent to 10 percent of the overall ADC revenue, according to Gartner. It provides application delivery capability through its Alteon hardware appliances or software instances, as well as via a cloud-based delivery model.

Radware

Strengths: The vendor has continued to integrate products in emerging software-defined networking and network function virtualization ecosystems. Radware offers cost-effective solutions though its Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure architecture that can scale up, scale in and scale out, according to Lerner.

Cautions: Customers tell Gartner that advanced features have been complex to deploy and difficult to manage. Enterprise customers also report Radware's user interface needs improvement.

Lerner said the company lacks global brand awareness and is weaker in specific geographies compared with the leading competitors.

Leader: Citrix Systems

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix Systemsn has a comprehensive set of both software and hardware solutions for ADC deployments spanning midsize to large enterprises as well as service and cloud providers. The vendor ranks No. 3 in both execution and vision on the quadrant.

Its NetScaler portfolio includes hardware, software and multi-instance hardware that consolidates multiple functionalities into a single platform, according to Lerner. Citrix maintains its No. 2 ranking based on revenue share, but it grew below the average growth rate of market leaders in 2014.

Lerner said an activist investor with a 7 percent stake in the company had aggressively recommended corporate changes including exploring the sale of Netscaler, although Citrix said it has no plans to sell it.

Citrix

Strengths: "Citrix has a broad and cost-effective product that serves the needs of most enterprises and a strong partnership with Cisco," said Lerner.

The vendor has integrated with a number of Cisco products including Nexus 1000V, Nexus 7000 and ACI. Citrix is also the only vendor to offer built-in discounts for customers who are willing to commit to multiyear support contracts for ADC services.

Cautions: Gartner clients report more problems with implementation and support compared with its competition, while the company has also not demonstrated the same level of enterprise expertise within complex deployments.

"The biggest thing that Citrix needs to improve upon is software quality, as we’ve received more complaints regarding implementation and support with Citrix than with other vendors over the past year," said Lerner.

Challengers: A10 Network s

With 7 percent market share, A10 is the fourth largest vendor when measuring by revenue. The San Jose, Calif.-based vendor is ranked No. 4 in execution and among the middle of the pack for vision.

Its Harmony platform includes hardware and software capabilities delivered through its Thunder Series of appliances. Lerner said A10 has been a longtime price and performance leader in the market with success in large-scale environments. It also recently released version 4.0 of its ACOS software that includes full exposure of all platform features via API, making it more appealing to developer-centric organizations, according to Gartner.

A10 Networks

Strengths: "A10 is well-established in large-scale environments like service providers, large government entities and very large enterprise. They’ve tailored their product features and price-performance to the needs of those large-scale buyers," said Lerner.

A10 providers some of the highest-performing network address translation and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) visibility functionality in the market, said Gartner.

Cautions: Gartner said the vendor's Web application firewall is immature and lacks the depth of functionality compared with leading competitors. It also does not have a cloud-based over-the-top capability to deliver ADC functionality.

"A10 struggles to differentiate themselves in the mainstream market," said Lerner.

Visionaries: Kemp Technologies

Pure-play Kemp Technologies has more than 13,000 paying customers despite its small size, with a broad and deep understanding of the market, said Lerner. The New York-based vendor is ranked No. 4 for vision and among the middle of the pack regarding execution.

Over the past year, Kemp added WAF capabilities, a replacement for Microsoft's Threat Management Gateway and additional application templates, according to Granter. The privately held company's line of LoadMaster products is aggressively priced for small and midsize enterprises, with increased adoption in the mainstream enterprise market.

"Kemp needs to grow their routes to market and channel in mainstream and larger enterprise," said Lerner.

Kemp Technologies

Strengths: Kemp's resale agreement with Dell and inclusion in AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud offerings have increased visibility and go-to-market capabilities, according to Lerner. It also has a range of physical and virtual appliance deployments and is the only vendor that supports bare-metal,white boxes on Cisco, Dell, HP and Oracle server hardware.

Cautions: The vendor may not have the required local support in all geographies because of its small size and there's a limited number of IT personnel familiar with Kemp, said Gartner.

Its WAF is also immature and lacks the depth of functionality compared with the leading competitors, according to Gartner.

Niche Player: Amazon Web Services

"AWS is quickly becoming the de facto choice for app-centric buyers that are doing development in Amazon," said Lerner. "To become a leader, Amazon needs to broaden their portfolio from an enterprise features and deployment perspective."

The most visible of a new breed of ADC vendors, AWS, Seattle, is targeting a new application delivery approach of "cloud-first/cloud-only and emerging micro-services," as well as buying centers outside traditional infrastructure and operations, according to Gartner. Its product suite of Elastic Load Balancer, Route 53 DNS services and CloudFront content delivery network are only available within AWS.

AWS is ranked among the middle of the pack for vision, but tied for last place on the execution front in the quadrant.

AWS

Strengths: Lerner said its solutions are lightweight, low-cost and well-integrated within Amazon's other developer tools.

Gartner customers say its ability to handle bursty workloads, simplified integration within AWS and the ability to load-balance across availability zones are market differentiators vs. traditional ADC competitors.

Cautions: "They currently lack more in-depth enterprise features and cannot be run outside of Amazon’s cloud offering. So you cannot run Amazon on-prem or in anyone else's cloud," said Lerner.

Its offerings have a very limited feature set compared with other ADC leaders that makes it unsuitable for complex traditional enterprise applications, according to Gartner.

Niche Player: Brocade

The San Jose, Calif.-based vendor has embarked on a significant strategic shift in moving away from a high-performance, basic-feature hardware platform to one where software is king. Brocade acquired Riverbed's SteelApp ADC product line and delivers it as its flagship offering -- rebranding it as vADC.

"Brocade has a better handle on the app-centric buyer than most of the other traditional ADC vendors. They support deployment modes and pricing models that are more aligned with those buyers," said Lerner.

Brocade is adding Layer 2 through Layer 4 functionality using Intel's Data Plane Development Kit, providing high performance on standard x86 server platforms, said Gartner. The vendor is ranked among the middle of the pack for both execution and vision on the quadrant.

Brocade

Strengths: Software represents more than 50 percent of its ADC sales in the past year, consisting of more than 3,000 ADC customers. Brocade's pooled usage licensing allows for simple scalability and its virtual solution enables organizations to create and configure generic load-balancing templates to simplify deployment of applications within cloud architectures, according to Gartner.

Cautions: There is no physical appliance offering for its flagship ADC product. Brocade also has limited market share and little experience in enterprise environments compared with leading competitors, according to Gartner.

Niche Player: Barracuda Networks

Security specialist Barracuda continues to focus on the SMB market with a broad set of storage and security products and services. The Campbell, Calif.-based vendor is among the middle of the pack for execution, but near the bottom for vision on the quadrant.

Lerner said its feature set, management and pricing is "well-aligned" for the SMB market. Barracuda has more than 9,000 ADC customers, representing more than 25 percent year-over-year growth.

Barracuda Networks

Strengths: Recent products released include a "very aggressively" priced 40-Gbps Layer 4 Load Balancer Fast Distribution Controller that can be deployed to enable scaling of security infrastructure, according to Gartner. Barracuda also provides free hardware upgrades to customers that purchase a four-year maintenance contract, which results in long-term CapEx savings.

Cautions: The vendor lacks the installation base and experience in large enterprise, with its SMB focus preventing it from gaining exposure in larger accounts that might find its products useful, according to Gartner. It also has a limited set of application deployment templates and experience with customization and programmatic interfaces and application-specific optimizations compared with the market leaders, Gartner said.

Niche Player: Array Networks

Milpitas, Calif.-based Array Networks provides ADC, WAN optimization and security products targeting environments with high SSL requirements in the midmarket and cloud provider markets. The vendor ranks among the bottom of the pack for both vision and execution.

With approximately 2,500 customers, Array provides physical and virtual appliances that support mix-and-match configurations and pay-as-you-go models, according to Gartner. The vendor has invested in cloud and virtualization orchestration and can support Microsoft, VMware and OpenStack platforms.

Array Networks

Strengths: Array has a simple-to-manage platform for the midmarket enterprises that can't afford dedicated ADC skills, but can also scale to larger environments, said Gartner. Its product also supports high-performance SSL implementation at a cost-effective price point.

Cautions: The vendor lacks an installed base and advanced capabilities for complex enterprise application environments compared with the leading competitors, according to Gartner. Array also has limited sales and channel resources.

Lerner said Array's biggest downfall is its lack of brand awareness in the broader enterprise market.

Niche Player: Sangfor

The privately held China-based company is a well-known vendor in the Asia/-acific market providing ADC, security and infrastructure solutions. Sangfor is ranked last for vision and tied for last place in execution with AWS on the quadrant.

In 2014, Sangfor grew above market rates and now has more than 4,000 customers with a focus on the public sector, finance and telecom verticals within the Asia region, primarily China.

"Sangfor could become a challenger if they continue to broaden their channels and routes to market, which would likely require them to increase adoption outside of China and [Asia/Pacific]," Lerner said.

Sangfor

Strengths: Sangfor is in good position to address the fast-growing Chinese market to provide products tailored to meet specific needs, according to Lerner. The vendor covers all primary ADC functions and also began shipping a virtual appliance for VMware in 2014.

Cautions: The vendor has very limited installed base and market coverage outside China, Gartner said. It also has limited software-defined networking and cloud integration options compared with the market leaders. Sangfor also lacks deployment options and was late to market with virtual instances, according to Gartner.