It can't be said the SD-WAN market is hurting for competition. With 70-plus vendors and service providers to choose from, enterprises are spoiled for choice.

However, with the market arguably dominated by less than a dozen major vendors, some newer entrants in the SD-WAN market have turned to serving small to midsized businesses (SMBs) in an effort to stand out.

In this segment, vendors like Big Leaf and Adtran have made a point of focusing their SD-WAN platforms on the needs of businesses with dozens of branch locations rather than hundreds or thousands.

“Most first-generation SD-WAN solutions seem to be targeted more toward the medium to large enterprise space,” said a spokesperson at Adtran, which launched its SD-WAN service last fall. “Service providers need a solution that can be quickly and easily installed in order to serve the large number of small businesses.”

Meanwhile, these smaller vendors are now facing stiffer competition as larger players like Cisco, VMware and Fortinet begin to diversify their offerings and target the SMB space.

Cisco has continued to push its Meraki SD-WAN platform, which is aimed at addressing many of the branch and access point needs of SMBs. In fact, one of the company's latest managed service provider wins was TPxCommunications, which chose Meraki specifically to address this market.

“One of the blind spots that we had was a standalone managed switch and managed wireless access point offering,” Erik Nordquist, senior product manager at TPx, told SDxCentral, adding that while it was possible to achieve this using Fortinet’s next-generation firewall appliances, cost often became an issue.

Last month Fortinet addressed the SMB market directly by launching its smallest SD-WAN appliance to date, the FortiGate 40F.

IDC analyst Brandon Butler said in markets as crowded as SD-WAN, it's not uncommon for vendors to start looking down market for new opportunities.

“We have seen an increased focus by some of the major SD-WAN vendors lower down into the market, both into the mid-market and into the small- to medium-size business sides of the market,” he said.

Butler notes that even as established SD-WAN vendors like Cisco go after the SMB market, it doesn't necessarily spell doom for smaller SD-WAN vendors.

The SD-WAN market is growing at an approximately 33% compound annual growth rate, he said. “Because this market is growing so fast … the pie is getting bigger,” Butler explained. “So, these smaller vendors will have an opportunity to make some hay in the SD-WAN market even if they’re not taking share from some of these larger vendors.”

According to a recent study by Gartner, 60% of enterprises have plans to implement SD-WAN by 2023, and more than 80% are planning to adopt a hybrid WAN combining both MPLS and broadband.

Simplicity of management, ease of deployment, and cost are some of the biggest considerations for SMBs that are looking to adopt an SD-WAN or SD-branch, said Imran Idrees, portfolio product marketing manager for Cisco Meraki.

"Smaller businesses are really looking at this from the lens of two things, cost-cutting or reducing the cost of spend on total WAN costs, as well as making sure that [software-as-a-service] applications like Office 365 or cloud-based payment systems are performing as good as they can," he said.

Idrees explained that in the past, smaller enterprises with 10, 20, or 30 branch offices may have relied on MPLS for connectivity.

"What's happened over the past few years is, the kind of links that are deemed enterprise worthy," Idrees said. "Regular broadband fiber has matured and we are able to provide [service-level agreements] similar, if not exactly the same as MPLS, but also at a much lower price point."

The bandwidth promised by broadband-enhanced WAN ultimately cemented Sage Dental's decision to adopt SD-WAN. The Boca Raton, Florida-based dental chain has approximately 750 employees operating out of more than 60 offices located throughout Florida and Georgia.

In an interview with SDxCentral, Dan Mirsky, VP of IT at Sage Dental said the company was facing widespread outages and losing 30-40 hours a month in productivity due to widespread outages affecting branches, as a result of an overburdened WAN.

He explained that all branch traffic was being carried by a 4 Mb/s MPLS connection. With the help of managed service provider R2 Unified Technologies, Mirsky and his team worked to replace aging infrastructure and deploy Meraki.

The deployment took just three months and the results were dramatic, he said. The network congestion, responsible for the outages was eliminated.

However, while the congestion and outages were by far the most pressing issue, the company has also experienced other benefits as a result of the deployment, according to Mirsky. These include enhanced security, wireless access, and the ability to deploy new technologies to improve patient care.

The company is now using more mobile technology for imaging and diagnosis because of the improved connectivity enabled by SD-WAN, he said.

In the case of Sage Dental, Mirsky had a previous, positive experience with Meraki that informed his decision. And name recognition among major players like Cisco and VMware is an inescapable factor in how managed service providers choose which vendors to offer.

Name recognition also played a part in TPx's decision to adopt Meraki, which made sense for several reasons, including its reputation for being both easy to deploy and manage, according to Nordquist.

Nonetheless, choosing the right SD-WAN vendor can be particularly challenging for enterprises new to the technology.

“Not all SD-WAN is created equal,” said Ben Niernberg, EVP at MNJ Technologies in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. “They are all very different in how they handle traffic and the way they work.”

In an effort to help enterprises choose the SD-WAN solution that best meets their needs the Buffalo Grove, Illinois-based managed service provider launched a proof of concept (PoC) demo lab last spring.

The facility allows customers to see how any of the SD-WAN vendors in MNJ's portfolio — Fortinet, Cisco Viptela and Meraki, Oracle Talari, Silver Peak, Versa, and CloudGenix — handle security, latency, jitter, WAN optimization, failover, or any combination thereof.

And according to Niernberg, the results have been surprising. He said roughly 70% of prospective customers are coming into the lab with one or two SD-WAN vendors in mind and leaving with another vendor.