Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler remain atop Gartner’s latest ranking of secure service edge (SSE) vendors, showing a clean pair of heels to rivals in a space that continues to gain momentum.

Gartner’s latest “Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge” showed those three vendors as the only occupants in the report’s “leaders” box, a space the trio has some long-standing familiarity with occupying.

Netskope’s ranking was based on its One SSE platform that uses its NewEdge network supporting physical points of presence (PoPs). Gartner pointed to Netskope’s “strong technical capabilities,” strong understanding of the SSE space, and robust brand awareness among enterprises, but dinged the vendor for its myopic focus on large customers, limited language support from its control console, and relative slow pace toward introducing new innovations.

Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Access platform was lauded for its market presence, artificial intelligence (AI) integration plans, and simplified integration. However, it received demerits for being focused on a relatively narrow set of use cases, complex pricing models, and limited language support.

Palo Alto Networks’ market success was highlighted by a recent pair of carrier wins.

AT&T selected the vendor to provide a higher-tier offering for the carrier’s cybersecurity focused Dynamic Defense service, while T-Mobile US layered Palo Alto Networks as an option within the carrier’s managed SASE offering.

Palo Alto Networks also scored well in a recent CyberRatings.org test, which showed the vendor’s Prisma SSE platform successfully blocked 100 percent of evasion attempts.

Gartner’s Zscaler ranking was based on a strong market presence, a simplified pricing scheme, and market innovation, while the analyst firm cautioned potential customers about Zscaler’s value, broad focus outside of the SSE space, and customer’s pointing to connectivity issues “more frequently than is typical for other vendors in this market.”

Challengers, visionaries, and honorable mentions

Fortinet remained the only vendor Gartner placed within its “challengers” quadrant, maintaining its lonely position in that space from last year.

Gartner’s “niche players” box was packed with Versa Networks, Broadcom, Cloudflare, iboss, and Skyhigh Security. Those first four maintained their same residence from last year’s report, while Skyhigh was bumped down from Gartner’s “visionaries” ranking.

Gartner did point to a handful of notable “honorable mentions,” including Cisco, Microsoft, Check Point Software, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)-Aruba, and Lookout. Those all typically failed to meet Gartner’s release date or scale requirements for official rankings.

SSE market dynamics

Gartner’s SSE rankings are both backed by and stand apart from similar reports from other analyst firms.

Forrester last year ranked the same three vendors – plus Forcepoint – as leaders of its SSE Wave report. That report was notable in that it called Zscaler “the 800-pound gorilla of SSE” based on the vendor’s early focus on the space.

GigaOm in its most recent Radar SSE report placed a similar leader tag on the same three vendors anointed by Gartner, but also place that label on Versa, Cato Networks, Cloudflare, and Skyhigh.

These rankings are increasingly important as the SSE space continues to see robust growth.

Dell’Oro Group this week reported that the SSE revenues increased 15 percent year over year during the first quarter. Some of that growth came at the expense of secure web gateway (SWG) appliance sales, which dipped 5 percent year over year, “underscoring migration toward SSE suites.”

Mauricio Sanchez, senior director for enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group, previously explained to SDxCentral that SSE is a more security focused component of the broader secure access service edge (SASE) ecosystem but remains the driving force behind SASE “while bringing along networking.”

“I think people realize that trying to treat these separately as has been done in the past doesn't lead or it's very hard or possible to get to the end result, which is a much more secure WAN-branch network,” Sanchez said. “I don't want to minimize [networking], I think that's still part-and-parcel to why people are leaving access routing … so we shouldn't minimize that piece. But I think what the higher strategic goal here is let's embrace this and do the total transformation because it'll get us a better security outcome, and along with it get to a better networking outcome.”

Sanchez added that while SASE and SSE market leaders are likely to continue to reap the largest financial rewards, there remains a place for those other vendors.

“For the smaller vendors in this space – and even for the for the large vendors – getting down market is an opportunity because that down market is still a laggard in shifting over to a more chassis-centric style of for their branch and for their remote access. But that down market, they don't have the pockets nor the wherewithal for being able to consume the technology that large enterprises have been using. So the market need is to figure out how do you bring the value, the goodness in a way that is it the right price points and at the right level of simplicity.”