Gartner’s four-year-old Magic Quadrant For WAN Edge Infrastructure report has seen its fair share of shakeups as market consolidation in the crowded SD-WAN market struck, and as more vendors joined the winner’s circle, i.e., the Leader quadrant.

This year saw six Leaders, with one newbie joining the fray. HPE, with Aruba Networks and Silver Peak, shot up from Visionary into the Leader quadrant as the company’s market visibility increased dramatically thanks to the Silver Peak acquisition. Cisco, a Leader last year and Challenger in 2019, retained its top spot on this year’s quadrant. The security players also held down the top spots on the report, while standalone SD-WAN-turned-SASE specialist Versa held onto its Leader title. Then there’s the companies that made SD-WAN deals last year that are helping the parent companies grow their WAN edge mindshare, like CradlePoint, now owned by Ericsson, and Juniper Networks, which bought 128 Technologies and moved from a Niche Player, to Visionary.

The first Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure published in 2018 included 20 providers, while this year’s report listed 15. Left off this year’s report was privately held communications vendor Teldat, which was dropped because it failed to meet the inclusion criteria, and former Leader Silver Peak, which was acquired by HPE.

The WAN edge market, which today is made up of SD-WAN and traditional branch routers is forecasted by Gartner to generate a compound annual growth rate of 2.6 percent in end-user spending from 2019 through 2025 -- the result of the robust growth of SD-WAN and the decline of traditional branch office routers. The research firm fully expects some aspects of the SD-WAN market to evolve into the SASE market.

Click through to see which vendors made the cut for Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.