Cisco claimed the top spot in IDC’s latest SD-WAN infrastructure forecast, which found the ever-competitive SD-WAN pack is showing little sign of slowing down. The IDC forecast – based on revenues from 2017 and 2018, and forecasts from 2019 – predicts a 30.8 % compound annual growth rate from 2018 to 2023, with overall market revenues reaching $5.25 billion.

“SD-WAN continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market, driven by a variety of factors,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure at IDC, in a statement.

According to the report, the SD-WAN market remained intensely competitive in 2018, with sales increasing 64.9% last year to $1.27 billion. At the top of the pack was Cisco with 46.4% of the market, according to IDC's findings.

“We expect Cisco to maintain its market share lead based on a variety of factors, including its 2017 purchase of Viptela, it’s move in 2018 to integrate Viptela’s V-Manage SD-WAN software into its popular ISR and ASR routers, and it’s SD-WAN offering from Meraki,” said Brandon Butler, senior research analyst at IDC.

Anand Oswal, senior vice president for Cisco's Engineering and Enterprise Networking Business, cited a pivot from early adopters to widespread adoption in an email to SDxCentral.

“Customers are no longer asking ‘what is SD-WAN?’, but ‘how can I deploy SD-WAN?’ and ‘how can I extend SD-WAN to the cloud, access, and data center domains,’” he wrote. “The latest IDC market share numbers demonstrate that Cisco’s customer-first SD-WAN approach is leading the way in delivering value to customers globally.”

VMware, riding on the success of its VeloCloud acquisition, held the No. 2 spot in market share last year with 8.8% of the market.

Trailing the industry stalwarts was Silver Peak with 7.4% of the market, followed by Nokia-Nuage and Riverbed with 4.9% and 4.3% respectively.

According to Butler the market could see some change as disruptors like CloudGenix and Versa gain traction in the industry.

IHS Markit recently released its SD-WAN ranking that had VMware generating the largest share of segment revenues during the first quarter of this year. Cisco was second on that list followed by Aryaka.

However, a direct comparison between the two reports is not a simple apples-to-apples comparison. IDC’s forecast focused strictly on SD-WAN infrastructure and didn’t take into consideration managed services or connectivity costs. The IHS report includes service revenues, and sales of appliance control and management software.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to clarify how IHS Markit generates revenue numbers for its SD-WAN report.