SD-WAN surges 45% in Q3 to reach record heights

Dell’Oro Group says Cisco Systems, Fortinet and VMWare led the year-on-year increase

A new report by Dell’Oro found the worldwide SD-WAN market grew 45% in Q3 of 2021 compared to the previous year.

Earlier this year, Futuriom predicted that the SD-WAN market would reach $2.6 billion in 2021, $3.5 billion by 2022 and  $4.6 billion by 2023, spurred by demand for more agile, high-performance, secure connections to cloud applications.

Dell’Oro said that Cisco maintained the top position for the revenue share for the quarter and was followed by Fortinet (which has just won Frost & Sullivan’s 2021 Global SD-WAN Vendor Product Leadership Award and earlier this week launched its first dual-modem SD-WAN appliance) then VMware in third place.

The research also found that the SD-WAN market continues to consolidate around a small number of vendors with the top six accounting for 69% of market share in 3Q 2021.

Cisco increased its lead at the top – its quarterly SD-WAN revenue nearly doubled in 3Q 2021 with especially strong growth in North America.

Dell’Oro also notes that market for hardware-based Access Routers grew quarterly revenues for the first time in almost two years.
 
“Enterprises are upgrading network infrastructures at accelerated rates compared to pre-pandemic times, and our research finds that the SD-WAN market is growing at strong double-digit rates in all regions of the world,” said Shin Umeda, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group.

“Because SD-WAN is software-based technology, the global supply chain disruptions have had less of an effect compared to hardware-based networking products,” added Umeda.