The highly competitive SD-WAN market is still very much in flux and the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant WAN Edge Infrastructure report bears that out. While VMware and Silver Peak continued to lead the WAN market in 2019, according to the report, Cisco lost ground falling from a leader in 2018, to a "challenger" in this year's report.

“Challengers” in Garter's report have demonstrated the ability to execute on customer needs and have long term viability in the market, but haven't proven their ability to drive innovation.

Unlike other industry reports, Gartner's Magic Quadrant WAN edge report does not center on market share or revenues and instead attempts to provide something of a report card for the industry. It places vendors into four categories — niche players, visionaries, challengers, and leaders — based on the completeness of their vision and their ability to meet enterprise demands.

Gartner highlighted several challenges faced by Cisco and its WAN customers, including system lock-in, a complex licensing structure, and scalability challenges.

“Cisco has broad, separate, and overlapping SD-WAN offerings that don't share a common management platform, hardware platform, or sales teams,” the report reads.

In a statement, Cisco rebuffed these critiques adding that its customer base speaks for itself.

“According to Gartner and IDC, Cisco is the market leader in SD-WAN," Cisco noted in a statement on the report. "We have more than 20,000 SD-WAN customers globally, including 70 of the Fortune 100. We believe this market traction speaks for itself — our customers and partners are trusting their business to Cisco Secure SD-WAN."

And Cisco wasn't alone. Riverbed fell from challenger in 2018, to a niche player in the latest report. Gartner defines niche players as having a near-complete product offering but has not shown the ability to transform the market or maintained sustained execution.

Riverbed's decline reflects a challenging year for the SD-WAN vendor. Earlier this year Riverbed announced an OEM partnership with Versa to resell its SD-WAN service, and in late October the company hired Rich McBee as CEO following the departure of Paul Mountford.

Gartner notes that Riverbed is the only SD-WAN vendor in the report that is sourcing its core SD-WAN functionality from a competing vendor, something it considers a risk. Gartner expects this OEM partnership will be a core focus for the company moving forward.

While Cisco and Riverbed slumped, Aryaka was reclassified from a challenger to visionary. Gartner describes visionary vendors as drivers of innovation in key areas of the WAN edge such as path selection, link remediation, automation, operational efficiency, and cost reductions.

In the report, Gartner highlights Aryaka's all-in-one SD-WAN offering, and its use of a global private backbone complete with cloud gateways. It also points out several challenges faced by the vendor, noting that Aryaka only supports internet and Ethernet connections to its services and limited hybrid SD-WAN configurations and contends that its managed service model may not appeal to large enterprises that prefer do-it-yourself solutions.

Gartner's final criticism centered on Aryaka's limited capacity to serve single countries and small geographic areas located too far from an Aryaka point of presence (POP), a point the company has openly acknowledged and is attempting to address with the announcement of regional SD-WAN and application acceleration services in November. In fact, with that announcement, Aryaka completely restructured its product line and business model to better address changes in the market.

These moves align with Gartner's predictions for the company, which called for enhanced cloud connectivity and integration, security vendor service chaining, and advanced analytics.

New in this year's WAN edge report is Aruba, which Gartner has classified as a niche player.

Gartner's classification of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) subsidiary should, however, come as no surprise given Aruba's recent entry into the WAN market with the launch of its SD-branch product line. Best known for its WiFi and LAN switching technology, Aruba leaped into the highly contentious WAN market last year.

Despite this, Gartner reports that the company sports a “solid, scalable orchestration platform that simplified deployment, management, and service assurance of wireless, wired, and SD-WAN environments,” but also noted the company's mixed visibility in the market and limited application performance capabilities for real-time traffic.

“Aruba is better known in the wired LAN and WLAN market segment and less known in the WAN edge segment, which may limit its ability to compete,” the report reads.

Two notable absences from the report were Cato Networks and Forcepoint, which were dropped because they failed to meet Gartner's inclusion criteria. The research firm notes that despite failing to meet inclusion criteria both vendors are still relevant in their respective markets.

The decision to drop Cato from the 2019 WAN edge report came as little surprise to Dave Greenfield, secure networking evangelist at Cato Networks, who wrote in an email to SDxCentral that Cato doesn't sell an appliance and Gartner's report relied on appliance metrics.

“Applying appliance company metrics to evaluate Cato's cloud subscription business is wrong,” he wrote. “While it's true that we were positioned as a 'visionary' last year, as a cloud service company that doesn't sell standalone SD-WAN appliances Cato was never an ideal fit for this MQ.”

Greenfield drove home that Cato's strategy is much better aligned with Gartner's secure access service edge (SASE), which describes a cloud-native platform that combines elements of SD-WAN and security.

“As we see it, there are two options facing enterprises,” said Greenfield. “They can make a tactical, point-solution decision with SD-WAN appliances now and move to a strategic SASE platform in the next refresh. Or, they can deploy a strategic, future-proof SASE platform today.”