The rapidly evolving software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) infrastructure market will grow at a 40,4% compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2022 to reach $4,5-billion.
This is according to IDC’s SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast, which includes 2016 and 2017 revenues by vendor for SD-WAN infrastructure.
“The emergence of SD-WAN technology has been one of the fastest industry transformations we have seen in years. Organisations of all sizes are modernising their WANs to provide improved user experience for a range of cloud-enabled applications,” says Rohit Mehra, vice-president: network infrastructure at IDC.
“Incumbent networking vendors have quickly realigned their routing and WAN optimisation portfolios to take on the growing cadre of startups in this market.
“Enabled by a rapid uptake across the service provider domain, SD-WAN infrastructure will continue to grow rapidly in the coming years, providing a beachhead for other software-defined networking and security functions in the enterprise branch.”
SD-WAN infrastructure revenues increased 83,3% in 2017 to reach $833-million. The market has also become increasingly competitive, with traditional networking vendors looking to M&A strategies to complement their existing offerings or gain a foothold in this rapidly-expanding market.
IDC found that Cisco holds the largest share of the SD-WAN infrastructure market, fuelled by its extensive routing portfolio that is used in SD-WAN deployments, as well as its Meraki offering and its August 2017 acquisition of Viptela.
VMware, which in December 2017 purchased VeloCloud, holds the second largest market share in the SD-WAN infrastructure market, followed by Silver Peak, Riverbed, Aryaka, Nokia and Versa.