The SD-WAN market this year was “mainstream and maturing,” according to Gartner. With around 70 suppliers, the analyst firm said the SD-WAN market’s supply side remains a crowded landscape, with large established vendors and smaller providers from multiple segments competing for market share.

“There’s a lot of vendors in this space. So it’s still quite fragmented, even though it’s becoming more and more top heavy,” Gartner Analyst Jonathan Forest told SDxCentral.

Forest added the market has seen and is expected to see more mergers and acquisitions (M&A) into next year, with Gartner clarifying “acquisitions may come in the form of small vendors combining to achieve scale, vendors looking to enter the space, and continued consolidation among networking and security vendors.”

But before we jump into the new year, here are the top five SD-WAN stories of 2022:

Gartner’s 2022 SD-WAN Magic Quadrant report identified Cisco, Fortinet, VMware, Palo Alto Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Aruba, and Versa Networks as market leaders. The analyst firm estimates the top 10 vendors make up more than 80% of the market.

To determine SD-WAN leaders, Gartner reviewed vendors’ product capabilities such as the ability to operate as a branch office router, and having a centralized management for devices, zero-touch configuration, and VPN with a basic firewall. The analyst firm also reviewed vendors’ business and financial performance based on their volume of customers, sites, and contracts. Read more.

Juniper Networks completed the Mist-ificaiton of 128 Technology’s Session Smart Routing portfolio following its $450 million acquisition of the SD-WAN vendor. The updates addressed day-one operations, including provisioning, deployment, and configuration of SD-WAN gateways, which had required 128 Technology’s Smart Conductor.

“Conductor is a great solution. It’s an on-prem solution, but ultimately we want to get folks to the cloud,” Jeff Aaron, VP of enterprise marketing at Juniper, told SDxCentral. Read more.

Cisco took the “first pivotal step” in delivering its Predictive Networks vision to introduce ThousandEyes WAN Insights that aim to proactively forecast network conditions and provide recommendations to optimize SD-WAN performance.

The new ThousandEyes product “is the first example of true predictive network intelligence that doesn’t just leverage machine learning (ML) to understand what’s happening and what might be wrong now, but actually predicts outages that have yet to happen, and will allow you to remediate them in real time,” Todd Nightingale, EVP and GM of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, said during the Cisco Live event. Read more.

Edge services provider Graphiant emerged from stealth, introducing its Graphiant Network Edge that provides connectivity between the enterprise WAN, hybrid cloud, network edge, customers, and partners delivered as-a-service.

Graphiant Founder and CEO Khalid Raza previously founded SD-WAN company Viptela, which Cisco acquired for $610 million in 2017. He told SDxCentral that Viptela was only a small piece of an SD-WAN mission Cisco “didn’t let” him complete.

Raza explained his vision for Viptela was to move the networking market to a place where hardware would become obsolete. But larger vendors like Cisco, he added, are reluctant to move away completely from hardware dependency. Read more.

Cisco updated its SD-WAN offering, including the addition of network quality of experience (QoE) metrics, a multi-region fabric, and identity-based security. The updates are targeted at enterprises prioritizing scalability and optimized network performance.

The latest release adds new capabilities to Cisco vAnalytics, which provides automation for Microsoft 365 network routing by providing visibility into network QoE metrics and Microsoft telemetry metrics for each available path. JP Shukla, director of product management for enterprise cloud and SD-WAN at Cisco, explained this enables users to access networking metrics on an analytics dashboard and “get the additional proof point, so they don’t have to trust [Cisco].” Read more.