With multiple complex SD-WAN offerings available and various players capable of delivering on-demand SD-WAN and multi-cloud network capabilities, the SD-WAN ecosystem and SD-WAN market is becoming an increasingly interesting area and a potential battlefield. This article provides an overview of the leading SD-WAN top vendors.
Understand the possibilities of SD-WAN
With multiple solutions on the market and a vast ecosystem of players, SD-WAN presents an exciting opportunity for enterprises to significantly simplify their existing WAN architecture while reducing costs and increasing business agility. SD-WAN was also one of the key early drivers of NFV/SDN deployments, particularly among North American operators, and was in the process of evolving into an increasingly cloud-centric and cloud-native service.
Different SD-WAN solutions align with different business priorities in different ways. Some SD-WAN solutions offer built-in end-to-end VPN options by default, while others work well with IoT elements such as surveillance cameras, alarms, and sensors. Other SD-WAN offerings are designed to provide clear, reliable voice and video connections or excellent connections to SaaS platforms like Salesforce.
SD-WAN is also an exciting opportunity because of its ability to simplify existing WAN architectures. By replacing proprietary, purpose-built stacks with white boxes and enhancing automation capacity, SD-WAN often improves the quality of life of technicians significantly, freeing them to focus on other tasks. SD-WAN is also generally cheaper than MPLS, but price can still be a sticking point for some feature-rich SD-WAN options. While installation is often relatively easy and support from major vendors is strong, it’s important to ensure your organization can handle installation and maintenance, or afford external maintenance.
There are several large, well-known providers that offer competing services. This article highlights some of them, such as customer implementations and partnerships or engagements with telecom operators.
1. Aryaka
Aryaka positions itself as a cloud-first SD-WAN company. One of the things that sets Aryaka apart from the competition is that it enables easy connectivity to China and other countries in Asia, despite regulatory hurdles and security requirements. The company also prides itself on their customer service and ability to quickly deploy to almost any country in the world.
Sample Deployment:
Aryaka worked with a medium-sized industrial company that was experiencing application performance issues for its remote users in China and employees in its Singapore office. Their existing MPLS network was also expensive. To solve these problems, they chose Aryaka SD-WAN. As a result, they increased application performance, including Microsoft 365 access, and reduced total cost of ownership by 10-25%.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
Aryaka has entered into an agreement with SK Broadband to offer its SD-WAN services, including access to Aryaka’s Ethernet network, which connects PoPs around the world.
It also has a partnership with China Mobile, through which Aryaka will leverage China Mobile’s long-haul connections to provide SD-WAN services to global companies with offices in China.
2. Cisco Meraki and SD-WAN powered by Viptela
With more than 30,000 SD-WAN edge customers, Cisco is a giant. They have established connections with many of the largest companies in a variety of sectors (used in some form in 70% of Fortune 100 companies).
They have two different offerings: Cisco Meraki and Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela. Position Merakit turns out to be an easy-to-implement offering primarily aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. It advertises high failover that ensures network resiliency, robust Wi-Fi and security camera support, and scalability.
Cisco Viptela is aimed at larger enterprise customers with more features, a greater ability to automate routine processes like installing or updating software, and the ability to handle larger, more complex networks. Cisco has made its solutions available to a range of companies, from industry-leading Fortune 500 companies to heritage conservation organizations, including the National Trust, which manages castles and other historically significant sites in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
Cisco works with a variety of different operators around the world. For example, Cisco has an ongoing partnership with MTN Business to provide Cisco Meraki and Viptela SD-WAN solutions to enterprise customers.
Orange Business Services is also working with Cisco on its own branded “Flexible SD-WAN” multi-vendor SD-WAN offering.
3. Secure Fortinet SD-WAN
As the name suggests, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers built-in, industry-leading security. Fortinet claims that its built-in security sets it apart from its competitors. At Cisco Meraki, for example, many companies choose to purchase security features from Umbrella to complement and complete the service offering. Fortinet’s SD-WAN is also feature-rich and scalable, aimed at organizations that need an agile, feature-rich, and most importantly, secure SD-WAN.
Sample Deployment:
During the pandemic, Fortinet helped Banco Fibra, a Brazil-based wholesale bank, migrate 100% of their employees to a secure remote work environment using existing FortiGate and FortiClient solutions. The public health situation in Brazil made it necessary for the bank’s employees to work from home. Due to the sensitive nature of the work, safety was essential, which made the task significantly more difficult. However, in less than 10 days, Fortinet made this transformation possible.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
In the Middle East, Fortinet partners with companies such as Zain to provide managed SD-WAN and security capabilities to enterprises such as SMBs in Kuwait.
In North America, GTT Communications also introduced Fortinet’s secure SD-WAN as part of a multi-vendor managed SD-WAN service portfolio. These leverages dedicated Fortinet appliances that combine next-generation firewall, SD-WAN, routing, and edge computing capabilities.
4. Juniper Networks
Juniper’s SD-WAN focuses on end-user experience, simplicity, and security. Juniper’s Mist AI is designed to maintain a strong end-user experience, provide insights, and automatically remediate issues impacting the user experience. This strong ability to automate also helps simplify day-to-day operations and frees technicians to focus on other important business tasks. Finally, Juniper claims to offer one of the most secure SD-WAN offerings available today with Zero Trust session integrity and secure vector routing to ensure simple and secure SD-WAN. Juniper also recently acquired start-up 128 Technology to enhance its AI and edge capabilities for businesses.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
In September 2018, Vodafone selected Juniper as an Enterprise Global SD-WAN Partner. This partnership includes the deployment of Juniper’s Contrail SD-WAN solution on Vodafone’s global networks to support Vodafone’s upcoming Ready Network product. The solution included Contrail Service Orchestration, which provides automated deployment, management and security for multi-domain networks, as well as a customer portal for end-to-end management of the WAN. The service used the Juniper NFX Series as the uCPE on which the VNFs that make up the service – including the advanced firewall – were installed at each corporate site.
5. Palo Alto Networks
Best known for network security and firewalls, Palo Alto Networks was founded in 2005 by Nir Zuk. They position their offering as a true next-gen SD-WAN because it is “application-defined,” meaning understand the WANwhat applications should be running and what priority certain traffic should have. This should lead to more efficient networking and a better fulfillment of specific business requirements. Palo Alto also acquired SD-WAN provider CloudGenix in 2020.
Sample Deployment:
AutoNation, an automotive dealership, wanted to reduce costs and simplify its network while increasing reliability and application access. To do this, they decided to move from a legacy MPLS system to Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma SD-WAN. This helped them achieve their goals while reducing their telecom budget by 25%.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
Palo Alto also works with Orange Business Services, where OBS leverages Palo Alto’s Prisma SD-WAN and Prisma Access as an integrated SASE solution.
6. Silver tip
Sliver Peak, now part of Aruba (a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company), is positioning its SD-WAN solution to offer both strong control and agility and economic efficiency. The former is provided by private; the latter pair is provided by public broadband and cloud. Silver Peak’s CEO – David Hughes – does not want to reinvent SD-WAN as a software-defined wireless access network – which is the canonical extension of the acronym – but as a self-driving WAN, a WAN that can intelligently meet and sustain specific business needs such as Application performance automatically.
Sample Deployment:
A leading financial software company partners with Silver Peak to implement an EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform to boost end-user application performance. The company used MPLS to connect more than twenty branch offices to its US headquarters. With SilverPeak, they switched to double-bonded commercial Internet lines and completely quiesced MPLS, significantly reducing costs.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
Silver Peak has an ongoing relationship with Verizon Business, which leverages its Unity EdgeConnect edge platform by integrating the Unity EdgeConnect CPE along with cloud delivery of SD-WAN software and controller capabilities into WAN optimization, uses.
KDDI’s London-based subsidiary, KDDI Europe, has also launched Silver Peak’s SD-WAN platform to serve global enterprises. The platform is delivered either via dedicated appliances in enterprise premises, generic uCPE appliances or the cloud.
7. Versa Networks (OS)
Versa Networks targets global, security-focused, or cloud-first businesses. It claims to offer excellent scalability, deployment, flexibility and security. Versa OS claims to be the only SD-WAN offering that combines SD-WAN, network security, advanced routing and secure access in a single software. Versa also has another SD-WAN offering, known as the Versa Titan, that’s aimed at lean IT environments.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
Versa Networks is working with Deutsche Telekom to develop an SD-WAN service solution based on Versa Secure SD-WAN and has rolled out it in a number of markets including Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Croatia.
8. VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud
Virtualization giant VMware has over 9,000 SD-WAN customers. In December 2017, the company acquired another SD-WAN market leader, VeloCloud, and its roster of telecom and enterprise customers. VMware’s SD-WAN isn’t built for a specific use case, it can be deployed at any scale for organizations in almost any industry.
Sample Deployment:
One instance of the VMware SD-WAN deployment was at Redmond, a leading sea salt brand in the United States that was undergoing rapid expansion. To accommodate this expansion, as well as the increasing need to run voice and multiple virtual desktops, a VMware SD-WAN solution was chosen to replace the aging branch office infrastructure. As a result, they delivered high-quality VOIP and virtual desktops enterprise-wide, increased performance for Internet-bound traffic by 50%, and significantly reduced operational costs.
Example partnerships with telecom operators:
In November 2020, Lumen Technologies announced a partnership with VMware and the addition of the VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN platform to Lumen’s multi-vendor managed SD-WAN portfolio.
BT has also launched a managed services version of VMware’s SD-WAN platform and at the time of announcement this is the first offering in a new BT-Portfolio of “cloud-optimized managed network services” aimed at multinational customers.
Conclusion
Apart from all the top 10 SD-WAN top vendors are Cisco, VM Ware, Versa, HPE Aruba SD-WAN, Fortinet, Palo Alto, Huawei, Juniper Networks and others. They have been offering high-quality SD-WAN services with a range of features to users across the globe for several years now.
