It's not enough for SD-WAN vendors to focus on connectivity or WAN optimization anymore, says Nuage CEO Sunil Khandekar.

According to Khandekar, SD-WAN vendors need to be able to provide customers with a product that will allow them to leverage the cloud while aligning with IT and business needs regardless of whether they are a large player with thousands of branch offices or a small outfit with less than a dozen.

SD-WAN's purpose has changed, he explained. It's no longer about just shifting traffic off of MPLS networks. Instead, SD-WAN is increasingly seen as a way for enterprises to securely leverage cloud resources.

Khandekar said vendors now need to be able to cater to a wide variety of use cases and verticals — many of which may not traditionally be associated with the technology — and they have to be able to scale those capabilities to enterprises of all shapes and sizes if they want to survive.

The growing reliance on the cloud also means security becomes all the more important. Traditional perimeter security isn't sufficient anymore, Khandekar said.

This is where Khandekar said Gartner has guessed correctly with its newly announced SASE category, which converges elements of SD-WAN and network security into a single, cloud-native offering.

"What Gartner has noted, correctly, is security is super important and ... security has to be tightly linked to an SD-WAN service," Khandekar said. However, he noted the level of security and its implementation is going to vary depending on the use case and the customer.

Moving into 2020, Khandekar expects the DIY approach to SD-WAN favored by North American enterprises will give way to managed SD-WAN service offerings. "Even in North America, more enterprises are starting to consider managed SD-WAN services," he said. "What enterprises care about is the ability to have control, the ability to understand what applications are being used, when there is an issue with security."

Several reports back up this prediction including Gartner's most recent WAN Edge Magic Quadrant report.

However, Khandekar isn't talking about the old-school model in which the managed services provider acts a go-between to resolve issues or implement changes. Instead, Khandekar said enterprises are increasingly turning to managed SD-WAN services that are "self-service rather than self-managed."

He explained that many enterprises are happy to let a managed services provider handle deployments, broadband and MPLS access, and troubleshooting, but they want an easy way to apply things like application or security policy using a self-service portal.

The problem for consumers today is there are just too many SD-WAN vendors out there. "It's a very very crowded market," Khandekar said, adding that service providers may be part of changing that. But he hopes to see them get much pickier about the kinds of SD-WAN products they are reselling.

This is something some vendors have already started doing. Last spring, Buffalo Grove, Illinois-based managed services provider MNJ began offering on-sight SD-WAN demos and proof of concept testing, where customers could visit the lab and see how various SD-WAN vendors handle their particular use cases.

And earlier this month, Criterion Networks launched its SDCloud platform, which aims to help MSPs evaluate SD-WAN platforms.

As managed services providers become more rigorous in their selection processes, "that is going to automatically start to weed out some of the vendors that are traditional appliance first and SD-WAN second," Khandekar said.

Nuage has even begun working with service providers to ensure customers can take advantage of these self-service capabilities, he added.