Adaptiv Networks rolled out a self-proclaimed significant update to its Connect SD-WAN platform that the vendor said provides easier support and management for its distributor partners and better positions the product against SD-WAN market rivals like Cato Networks.

The new updates tap into Adaptiv’s Connect Network and Cloud Orchestrator to make it easier to manage the SD-WAN service. This includes easier management of high availability deployments with simplified remote access for SD-WAN edge devices and firmware updates; new third-party monitoring integrations for alerting, real-time WAN troubleshooting, and LAN diagnostics; VLAN support for network segmentation; and a redesigned customer dashboard.

The latest update builds on the 8.0 release from just under a year ago. That enhancement was focused on a new zero-trust network access (ZTNA) foundation and cloud security capabilities for better secure access and connectivity.

Adaptiv Networks CEO Bernard Breton said the latest 8.1 update is one of the more significant from the vendor, even more so than the 8.0 release.

“It's really the release that completely matures that new generation platform,” Breton said. “The 8.0 release was a good product but it was just like all the dot-zero products that lacked capabilities here and there, which each of them taken individually might appear to be not the critical sort of end-customer capabilities, but they were more around manageability, making it easier to wrap your arms around the solution for the partners, because we only sell to partners, we don't sell direct at all.”

Breton added that those partners provided feedback that fed directly into the 8.1 update, including easier scalability.

“At scale is very different than managing a couple of customers,” Breton said. “At scale means being able to very quickly identify pain points in the network, to get alerts for things that have a high level of severity, to be able to click on a customer with thousands of sites, and within seconds getting to something that is actionable. And that's where at scale is quite different.”

Breton added that surfacing actionable insight is important because it can be easy for a modern SD-WAN platform to simply apply a patch or workaround to a potential networking issue without actually fixing that issue.

“Someone's going to have to figure them out because there's an underlying problem that can become a real problem. They might not be able to mask it forever,” Breton said. “A good example is that you've got a link that's down. Well, if you do nothing and the second one goes down and you only have two links, suddenly the site is down.”

Competitive SD-WAN positioning

Breton noted that Adaptiv remains focused on working through its partner channels to provide a managed SD-WAN service targeting the small- and mid-sized enterprise space. This is a space that includes much larger entrenched competitors that have also increasingly tapped into secure access service edge (SASE) to bolster their positions.

Those entrenched players are driving a market that IDC predicts will see a 10% compound annual growth rate over the next several years, hitting $7.5 billion in sales by 2027. SASE is expected to be a catalyst for that growth.

Gartner, in a separate report, estimates that 60% of new SD-WAN purchases will be part of a single-vendor SASE offering by 2026, a significant increase from 15% in 2022.

Breton specifically pointed to Cato Networks as one of those top competitors that Adaptiv is focused on, noting, “as far as I’m concerned, they’re the best product in the market.”

However, Breton said that Adaptiv is able through its partners to provide a more compelling pricing option versus Cato Networks.

“We hear all the time from partners saying, ‘We love Cato, but our customers can't afford Cato. So we need a solution that is like Cato,’ which we are – ‘but our customers are able to buy,’ and that's the market we play in,” Breton said.

Breton also noted that other market players have started to lose the SD-WAN path.

“VeloCloud used to be a big player in the space, which started to slow once it was acquired by VMware and now has no market with Broadcom,” Breton said.

Breton also explained that other players like Fortinet and Cisco Meraki have SD-WAN products but lack some of the security features Adaptiv can offer.

“The traffic is unencrypted, there's no bi-directional QoS, there's no seamless failover, there's no resilience of the IP scheme, there’s is no real carrier agnostic in those,” Breton said. “All of the core tenets of SD-WAN, they don't do.”

Breton added that Adaptiv will remain focused on punching above its SD-WAN weight.

“The main challenge that we have is that we're a small business and we cast a small shadow in the market,” Breton said, which means it’s important for the vendor to be very clear when describing its advantages. “When we have that conversation with customers or with partners, it really does resonate magnificently.”