Cisco, Juniper Networks, Aruba, and Extreme Networks topped the charts of Gartner's latest Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure Magic Quadrant report this week. The four vendors were classified as leaders in the market.

Unlike other industry reports, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant WAN reports don't attempt to rank vendors on market share or revenues and instead provides something of a report card on the industry. It places vendors into four categories — niche players, visionaries, challengers, and leaders — based on the completeness of their vision and their ability to meet enterprise demands.

Gartner's latest report focuses on the LAN switching and wireless access markets and evaluated 18 vendors in the space. The report showed a clear divide between established leaders and niche players with all but six vendors receiving a rank of niche player. Huawei and Fortinet were the only two vendors to receive a visionary ranking.

Juniper Ascends to Market Leadership

Juniper, fresh on the heels of its Mist acquisition, joined the leadership party, ascending from the rank of visionary, in this year's report.

Gartner praised Juniper's rich artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning automation capabilities. "Rich telemetry data fuels the AI [and machine learning] engine that provides predictive hardware and software recommendations that eliminate service calls," analysts wrote.

Gartner also highlighted the company's proactive service assurance and strong market voice, which have enabled the company to preempt software and hardware issues and continue to win new customers.

However, analysts cautioned customers of potential challenges facing Juniper's reach in global markets and a lack of legacy functionality.

Cisco, Extreme, Aruba Lead the Pack

Cisco, Extreme, and Aruba continued to lead the LAN switching and WLAN market in this year's Magic Quadrant report.

Gartner applauded the strength of Cisco and Aruba's portfolio across a broad audience, ranging from small to midsized businesses (SMBs) to large enterprise and campus deployments.

"Aruba's [Edge Services Platform] is a comprehensive cloud-driven platform that unifies, automates, and secures the campus, branch, and remote network, while maintaining an open programmable API that provides flexibility," the analysts wrote.

Likewise, Gartner highlighted the strength of Cisco's multivendor integration.

"Cisco provides a campus infrastructure with multivendor integration and analytics insights with open, programmable APIs that are designed to allow flexibility between different applications and components," analysts wrote.

However, the report continued to caution customers about Cisco's separate and diverse product lines which are not interoperable, have separate sales and support tracks and, as a result, face inconsistent pricing strategies.

Gartner also called out Aruba's limited global reach, portfolio complexity, and inconsistency between its cloud and on-premises offering.

Meanwhile, Extreme received high marks for its simplified product portfolio in the wake of the Aerohive acquisition in 2019.

"Successfully moving to integrate the fruits of several acquisitions, Extreme has delivered convergence onto a multi-persona hardware platform that can be loaded with differing applications but continues to move to a universal platform," the analysts wrote.

Gartner expressed some concerns with Extreme's current offering, specifically with respect to the company's cloud management console and legacy hardware from previous acquisitions.

"Enterprises need to ensure that acquired capabilities are part of the roadmap, especially when migrating from a legacy solution that was part of an acquired entity to an updated product," analysts wrote.

Fortinet Joins the Visionary Crowd

Security vendor Fortinet made the leap from niche player to visionary vendor in this year's report, propelled by its "strong security" focus and unified management platform.

According to Gartner, this security-centric approach may give Fortinet a leg up on its competition, especially when enterprises require stringent security policies, such as those using IoT devices.

Gartner also talked up Fortinet's "feature-rich" licensing structure, which includes both security and management features at no additional cost.

Fortinet lost marks in management, as Gartner described Fortinet's management console as complex and unintuitive compared to other vendors. Analysts also warned that the company has not made wide use of AI and machine learning in its wireless and switching portfolios.

Arista Carves Out a Niche

Arista is the newcomer in this year's report from Gartner. The company effectively bought its way into the market last year with the acquisition of Mojo Networks. Since then, the company has integrated the technology into its Cognitive Campus portfolio.

Arista has a lot going for it, including a flexible pricing model that can be deployed as a perpetual or subscription model, a preference for open configuration, and robust wireless intrusion detection, according to Gartner.

However, the company isn't without challenges in the wireless and LAN switching market. Arista's limited use of AI and machine learning, its heavy investment in the North American market, and limited voice in a crowded market remain obstacles, according to Gartner.

"Arista messages such as modern architecture, single network OS, or client-to-cloud consistency appear to be focused on Arista data center customers," analysts wrote. "Gartner clients do not typically ask about these features during inquiries about campus networking."