Market share in the software-defined wide area networking market is difficult to pinpoint, as it combines sales both of networking hardware and carrier services.
SD-WAN hardware includes appliances and routers, SD-WAN software that includes orchestrators, gateways, cloud routers and firewalls, dashboards, management systems among others, and SD-WAN services that includes service provider managed SD-WAN services.
Beyond that, early estimates vary by nearly an order of magnitude. Observers might debate the importance of SD-WAN as a service provider product, but the strategic upside comes in two ways.
First, it is possible that SD-WAN, as a way of connecting branch offices, becomes a growth market in its own right, displacing other solutions enterprises have used. So it is possible that carriers can take much market share from appliance and software suppliers.
The longer-term possibility is that SD-WAN becomes the enabler of other value and revenue service providers can supply.
So far, as most of the SD-WAN activity has been appliance-based and installed by enterprises or other end user organizations, most of the sales activity has been garnered by edge equipment suppliers, not service providers.
The expectation is that, over time, more share will be taken by service provider offers (SD-WAN as a service, if you like that formulation). That belief is bolstered by the likely use of SD-WAN as a replacement for other carrier services.
On the other hand, some might argue that since SD-WAN increasingly bundles the functions of encryption, path control, overlay networks and subscription-based pricing together, the edge equipment approach to SD-WAN in many instances will be a substitute for other purchases enterprises have made in the past (routers, security appliances and software, special access services).
In a broad sense, the service provider opportunity likely will involve building on SD-WAN connectivity to supply additional features and services.
The issue, perhaps, is how much of the value of edge equipment market overall service providers can replicate “as a service.”
source: Open Networking Summit
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