Gartner’s latest SD-WAN Magic Quadrant ranking highlighted the increasingly top-heavy nature of the market, with the big six leaders remaining consistent from last year while the tertiary players dwindling due to a growing focus on edge-focused security components.

The latest ranking included a total of 11 vendors, which was three fewer than Gartner included in last year’s ranking. The six “leaders” remained the same (Fortinet, Broadcom/VMware, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise/Aruba, Versa Networks, Palo Alto Networks), while only Huawei, Juniper Networks, Peplink, Ericsson/Cradlepoint, and Barracuda took up residence in the remaining three boxes in the latest report.

Gartner noted that the top seven SD-WAN vendors accounted for two-thirds of the market, with a dwindling number of providers – with more security focused product architectures – accounting for the remaining share.

“Acquisitions are likely to continue primarily around SD-WAN and network security vendors consolidating to form single-vendor SASE [secure access service edge],” the Gartner team noted. “We also have observed some vendors exiting this market over the last few years (Nuage Networks, Oracle, Riverbed, and Citrix). For SD-WAN vendors to have long-term market relevancy, they need to have a SASE strategy as SD-WAN evolves to more of a feature.”

Those vendor dynamics are also present in companies that remain significant competitors in the space. This includes Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, HPE’s pending acquisition of Juniper Networks, and vendors like Zscaler and Cloudflare “adding SD-WAN functionality to their solutions.”

SD-WAN challengers, visionaries, and niche players

But what differentiates the SD-WAN leaders and all the rest?

China’s Huawei is the largest SD-WAN market player outside of Gartner’s leaders ranking, with Huawei estimated to have 38,000 enterprise customers. That places the vendor ahead of some of the players deemed market leaders.

Gartner praised Huawei’s “sales execution,” which it noted were driven by a strong channel and attractive pricing, robust platform investment plans, and its SD-branch capabilities that tie together different connection methods to support edge deployments. However, geopolitical challenges have limited Huawei’s market position to its home country and select countries in Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Juniper Networks’ “visionaries” status was based on an opposite set of fundamentals. Gartner noted that the vendor had only around 4,000 SD-WAN customers, with a limited sales channel and narrow geographic strategy.

However, Juniper Networks’ was touted for its forward-looking use of artificial intelligence (AI) to power some of its SD-WAN services, which is an area that Gartner said enterprises should evaluate when targeting an SD-WAN platform.

The remaining trio of “niche players” commanded modest scale, but some unique services.

Ericsson/Cradlepoint operates with the most scale, as Gartner estimates the vendor served 7,500 SD-WAN customers, “with operations primarily in North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region, focusing on cellular wireless WAN use cases in specific verticals such as retail, transportation, and public safety.”

Ericsson recently moved to further tighten the integration of Cradlepoint’s operations by taking over the lead branding on private 5G and enterprise-focused products, which followed Ericsson’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Cradlepoint that closed in 2020. Cradlepoint has since launched several new products that have grown its presence in that market, including network-slicing ready SD-WAN and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) products, and a more recent push around 5G-based SASE platforms.

Peplink has a similar cellular and WAN focus serving around 7,000 customers, with a strong focus in Asia-Pacific and Japan. However, the vendor was noted to have low SD-WAN market visibility and a narrow product roadmap that could limit its ability to attract more growth.

Gartner tied Barracuda Networks to 4,500 enterprise SD-WAN customers, mostly “smaller enterprises and small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in selected verticals.” That focus is backed by competitive pricing characteristics and strong integrated on-premises security, with Gartner expecting the vendor to invest in its dedicated cloud-based analytics platform and edge compute capabilities in support of IoT use cases.

Overall, Gartner predicts the SD-WAN market will grow at a 16% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2023 through 2028, which is based on the current market sitting at approximately 65% penetration.