What does it take to win in the hyper-competitive SD-WAN market? According to Gartner’s latest WAN Edge Infrastructure Magic Quadrant, a robust secure access service edge (SASE) strategy might be a good place to start.

Of the six vendors to grace the report’s leadership category — Fortinet, VMware, Versa, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Silver Peak — all of them have previously announced SASE products and partnerships.

And moving forward, Gartner expects the SD-WAN market to get even SASE-er over the next few years. By 2024, analysts predict 70% of SD-WAN customers will have adopted a SASE architecture compared with just 40% in 2021.

In the report, Versa and Palo Alto Networks received some of the highest marks when it came to SASE functionality.

Versa “has one of the broadest and most capable solutions in this market,” the report read. Palo Alto Networks was also lauded as a “leading vendor driving toward a single-vendor SASE solution.”

And on that topic, while both VMware and HPE have announced SASE platforms of their own, Gartner criticized the vendors for their reliance on third-party security providers.

“Native, advanced security capabilities, such as cloud security, are competitive gaps compared with some other vendors,” analysts wrote of HPE.

VMware’s SASE is offered in collaboration with Menlo Security, while HPE has announced a number of integrations with security vendors, including Check Point Security and Cloudflare.

Analysts argue that relying on partnerships may limit the vendor’s ability to address emerging customer security needs.

Meanwhile, Fortinet, which only recently dipped its toes into the SASE market with the acquisition of Opaq last year, was criticized for its failure to support multivendor SASE architectures, with Gartner calling its FortiSASE platform “largely unproven.”

Gartner also called out artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation as key differentiators among leaders in this year’s report.

Analysts expect more than 40% of enterprise SD-WAN deployments will utilize some combination of these technologies to automate day two operations by 2025, compared to fewer than 5% in 2021.

To date, all six of the leaders in this year’s report have announced some kind of AI operations capabilities.

In particular, Gartner highlighted Cisco’s “strong visibility of traffic transversing the internet and to public cloud services” enabled via a ThousandEyes integration.

The vendor announced the integration this spring at its annual Cisco Live event and recently detailed how the integration would eventually allow customers to dynamically reroute traffic over various middle-mile networks to mitigate disruptions.

Not to be left out, analysts also called out Palo Alto Networks for its “strong” AI analytics capabilities.

While the six leading vendors managed to fend off their competitors for another year, that isn’t to say their performance was flawless.

Gartner once again criticized Cisco for its high prices, poor customer experience scores, and limited interoperability between its Viptela and Meraki SD-WAN platforms.

And on the topic of acquisitions, analysts called out Palo Alto Networks for failing to consolidate its ION-series SD-WAN appliances — acquired with the purchase of CloudGenix — and its existing hardware firewalls into a single appliance.

“The vendor has multiple products without an elegant integrated solution providing branch security, cloud security, and SD-WAN,” analysts wrote.