The SD-WAN market is hotter than ever, according to Gartner, who's 2020 Magic Quadrant WAN Edge Infrastructure report fields no fewer than six market leaders. VMware and Silver Peak — the sole leaders in last year's report — were joined this year by Versa and Palo Alto Networks, which ascended from visionary status, and Fortinet and Cisco, which hopped the fence from challenger to leader.

While several vendors made considerable gains in the latest report, Aryaka and Oracle's Talari platforms were dropped by Gartner after they failed to meet the inclusion criteria. Previously, Aryaka was listed as visionary, while Talari was considered a niche player.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant differs from other industry reports in that it doesn't rely on market share or revenues. Instead, the report attempts to place vendors into four categories — niche players, visionaries, challengers, and leaders — based on the completeness of their vision and their ability to meet enterprise demands.

The increased competition has been fueled in part by a string of high-profile acquisitions and developments surrounding Gartner's secure access service edge (SASE), which has driven SD-WAN vendors to evolve their offerings since last year's report.

Versa and Palo Alto Networks made the jump from visionary — described by Gartner as a driver of innovation — to market leader in this year's report.

According to Gartner, Versa's VOS — formerly FlexVNF — offers customers a comprehensive suite of networking, cloud access integrations, and security through its emerging SASE offering. Gartner also highlights Versa's rapid growth, which it claims has outpaced the market, validating the company's go-to-market strategy. The vendor has aggressively expanded its service provider network over the past few months, announcing partnerships with OmniClouds and Telarus earlier this summer.

However, the report also cautions that Versa's VOS platform remains complicated to operate and warns that a broad roadmap could spread the company too thin.

Palo Alto's $420 million acquisition of CloudGenix catapulted the security vendor into WAN leadership territory.

"With Palo Alto Network's acquisition of CloudGenix, the vendor has one of the more complete SASE offerings when fully integrated," the report reads.

Palo Alto still faces some challenges with application performance optimization and a lack of retail-focused all-in-one appliances, according to the report. However, it should be noted that earlier this month, the company launched a retail-focused SD-WAN appliance alongside new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities.

Cisco reclaimed its leadership rank in this year's report after the company was demoted to challenger in 2019.

Last year's report called out Cisco for system lock in, complex licensing, and challenges with scalability. And while many of these challenges still persist, Gartner's tune has softened on the networking heavyweight.

Gartner praised Cisco's "solid roadmap to deliver increasing security capabilities in an integrated fashion driving toward a SASE architecture," the report reads. Cisco launched its SASE platform this spring on the back of its Viptela SD-WAN, Cisco Umbrella, and Duo platforms.

With that said, Gartner continues to caution customers that Cisco's SD-WAN portfolio remains fragmented and many of its offerings present limited investment protection should needs change. Cisco also continues to see "nearly double the rate of concerns regarding product and pricing, compared to other vendors," Gartner reports.

Another SD-WAN turned SASE vendor to make it into the leadership circle was Fortinet, which announced its shift to SASE alongside the acquisition of security vendor Opaq.

"Fortinet has one of the most capable security solutions in this research, and, when combined with other SD-WAN functionality, it yields a comprehensive offering," the report reads.

Gartner credited the vendor's use of ASICs, which has allowed the company to deliver services at highly competitive price points and deliver a full suite of on-premise SD-WAN features. However, the report cautions customers that Fortinet is relatively new to complex architectures and has limited experience with cloud security.

In the year since Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)-owned Aruba Networks landed on Gartner's Magic Quadrant, the company has continued to develop its SD-branch offering. These developments earned it a visionary ranking in the latest report.

Aruba's single operator model for LAN, WLAN, WAN, and security across campus and branch puts the company in a position to change the WAN conversation, Gartner reports.

However, Gartner reports that HPE's $925 million acquisition of Silver Peak, which was once again ranked a leader in the report, was not represented as the deal had yet to close at the time the report was finalized. It remains to be seen if or how HPE plans to integrate Silver Peak into Aruba.

Juniper Networks also made the leap from niche player to visionary. Like Aruba, Juniper's Mist acquisition and subsequent investments have garnered it a comprehensive WAN, LAN, and WLAN offering that is further enhanced by its Marvis AI operations platform and Contrail orchestrator.

However, Gartner notes that Juniper lacks cloud functionality needed to simplify branch connectivity to cloud workloads and is lacking on the application performance optimization front. Gartner also notes that "Juniper has had a poor track record in market execution, has suffered from a lack of market visibility, and has shown limited sales execution, leading mostly through [managed service providers]."