AT&T, Orange Business and Verizon garnered top marks from a pair of research firms in their latest ranking of worldwide managed SD-WAN providers, with one stating that the U.S. accounts for the largest share of consumed SD-WAN services.

ISG labeled those three operators as “leaders” across the five sectors the research firm tracks: managed services provider (MSP), Software-Defined Networking (Sdn) transformation services, enterprise networks technology and service suppliers, edge technologies and services, and secure access service edge (SASE) solutions and services. Consulting firm WiPro was also labeled a leader across those same five segments.

Vertical Systems Group came to a similar conclusion, ranking AT&T, Orange Business and Verizon as the three top global providers of carrier-managed SD-WAN services. That ranking was based on global market share outside of a provider’s home country.

Those three operators have been aggressive in continuing to build out their MSP portfolios.

AT&T recently deepened its work with Cisco to include increased security for SD-WAN services and could add the ability to integrate mobile 5G and fiber Broadband to more Enterprise customers.

William Eborall, assistant VP of product marketing management at AT&T, explained that AT&T’s deeper work with Cisco is based on the carrier’s push toward simplifying its Enterprise offerings.

“When you do a lot, it’s difficult to do it very well and to do it as fast-paced as this industry and as fast as the software changes, as fast as the technologies are collapsing and integrating. I think that also creates a challenge to continue to scale across a broad set of vendor technologies and continue to innovate our own management ability,” Eborall said. “I think Cisco is a classic example of what we’re trying to do. It’s going to be ‘do more with less,’ and picking vendors that we can truly invest in, create new unique things in the marketplace. To do that it takes a lot of investment, not just financial, but resources and time to build out those unique capabilities.”

Orange Business struck a deal with Palo Alto Networks to launch a cloud-native, fully managed SASE service, while Verizon has been increasing its focus and adding SD-WAN features from vendor partners like VMware to its MSP service.

Outside of those market leaders, ISG placed operators T-Mobile, Apcela and Lumen, and consulting firm Accenture as leaders in three of its monitored segments. Cato Networks, Comcast Business, Kyndryl and Tech Mahindra were labeled leaders in two segments, with Aruba, Extreme Networks, GTT, Microland and VMware all placed as a leader in one of the tracked market segments.

Vertical Systems Group’s carrier-focused top-eight ranking extended to BT Global Services, NTT, Telefónica Global, Hughes and Vodafone. The research firm did note that, compared to the year-end 2021 ranking, AT&T took over the top spot from Orange Business; BT swapped places with NTT; and Hughes surged from its “challenger tier” to surpass Vodafone in the latest ranking.

ISG’s report also noted that the U.S. leads the world in SD-WAN consumption, with the country inhaling more than 30% of the “world’s SDN solutions and services.”

“SDN is a proven means of assisting cloud migration,” Dieter Thompson, partner and president of ISG’s network and software advisory business, wrote in the report. “Most U.S. enterprises recognize that successful IT evolution requires network modernization.”

ISG also noted that adoption is increasingly coming via some form of managed-service model, including fully managed or comanaged, “potentially because of the overall complexity of modern networks and the difficulty of hiring and retaining staff with the necessary skills.”

That complexity includes the growing integration of security components that include security services edge (SSE) and, when combined with SD-WAN, formulate most SASE platforms.

“SASE is where Enterprise networking and security converge,” Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader for ISG’s Provider Lens research, wrote. “It has matured from pilot projects to many real commercial deployments, and providers now offer fully managed SASE services.”