Gartner again gave a nod to Cisco, Extreme Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)/Aruba, and Juniper Networks as leaders in its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure, with Huawei joining that list for the first time.

According to the research firm, the enterprise LAN market now comprises vendors delivering not only wired and wireless networking hardware, but also the interrelated network management, analytics, and security applications.

Tim Zimmerman, VP analyst at Gartner, continues to see factors like network automation capabilities becoming more critical to infrastructure, “based on the fact that CIOs identify either shortage of people and/or shortage of skills as being two of their highest priorities.”

“Machine learning and [artificial intelligence] capabilities to be able to reduce staff and or provide higher SLAs in the market are going to be very important things that the vendors need to provide to their clients,” Zimmerman told SDxCentral.

The integration of network hardware and software delivers the “mission agility, pervasive security, and increased levels of experience required by end users across all types of connected applications and devices,” which has led to core integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) being “integral to correlating the flood of resultant data,” Gartner said in the Magic Quadrant overview.

Gartner also predicts network opex costs will rise by at least 15% every year for the next five years for 70% of enterprises due to a lack of a plan to mitigate network hardware supply chain issues.

Zimmerman noted it is important to remember that the Magic Quadrant looks at 17 different variables from each vendor that are "not always product focused."

“The factors that keep vendors in the Magic Quadrant from a leadership standpoint differ from vendor to vendor,” he explained, adding marketing execution, sales execution and pricing, geographical reach, and customer experience are also considerations that come into play.

For vendors like Juniper Networks and Aruba, who are "clear leaders, geographical diversity is going to play a larger role than some of the other vendors because they they already checked the boxes for the products," Zimmerman said.

The ability to advance in the quadrant or maintain leadership for these vendors that have already established strong product capabilities is going to be based on expanding access to their their products, he added, "because the quadrant is moving up into the right."

By contrast, Zimmerman pointed to Cisco as an example of a vendor whose issue is not geographical diversity, "because they have that, and they execute that very well." Rather, the long-standing leader is now faced with finding a migration strategy from historical products like Cisco Catalyst to managed services and automated products now high in demand on the market.

"If I looked at Cisco, both the Catalyst and the Meraki products are middle of the pack, versus the fact that they're shown as a leader because of their geographical expansion and their huge marketing capability," Zimmerman explained. "So the things that are going to affect the vendors vary a little bit depending on the particular vendor."