By almost any measure, the SD-WAN sector burned bright in 2019. Dell'Oro Group's research found that the SD-WAN sector grew by 64% last year, and surpassed the $1 billion mark in 2019.
In Dell'Oro Group's first SD-WAN market share report, it identified Cisco, Silver Peak, Versa Networks, VMware and Fortinet, in that order, as the five leading vendors. (Seeing VMware fourth on Dell'Oro's rankings is somewhat surprising.) Those five vendors had a combined revenue share of almost 60% in the 2019.
“SD-WAN had a breakout year in 2019. The market moved beyond the early adopter phase, and we observed that vendors with larger installed bases gained the critical mass needed for sustained revenue growth,” said Shin Umeda, vice president at Dell’Oro Group, in a statement. “This is a highly competitive market and with no vendor taking more than 20 percent market share, and we expect an ongoing market share battle in the coming years."
Fortinet, which started offering its SD-WAN service two years ago, in particular had a good year in 2019, which placed it just ahead of Aryaka for fifth-place.
RELATED: Industry Voices—Chua: SD-WAN fruit punch — a market share galore
In August, AvidThink founder and principal Roy Chua examined various research and analyst group's SD-WAN rankings, which generally concluded that VMware/VeloCloud and Cisco were the top-two SD-WAN vendors. Chua previously said that some of the big SD-WAN trends for this year include tighter SD-WAN integration into SaaS applications and IaaS platforms and multi-cloud capabilities.
RELATED: Industry Voices—Raynovich: What's next for SD-WAN? A bigger, bolder play
As for what's driving SD-WAN in 2020, Scott Raynovich, the founder and chief analyst of Futuriom, wrote in a FierceTelecom blog that SD-WAN is "going to move deeper into the cloud to solve some of the larger problems encountered by enterprises and service-providers, such as cloud security, cloud applications performance, and multi-cloud connectivity."
Additional highlights from the Dell'Oro Group's Fourth Quarter Router and Carrier Ethernet Switch Report included:
• The worldwide service provider router and Carrier Ethernet switch market ended the year with a sharp 7% year-over-year revenue decline in Q4 2019, and grew a modest 1% for the full year .
• Huawei and Nokia achieved milestones in the most recent fourth quarter by taking the top spots in the worldwide service provider router and Carrier Ethernet switch market and the service provider edge router segment, respectively. It was the first time ever that Cisco wasn't the top vendor in those two categories.