As we embark upon 2021, we have an opportunity to put the challenges of the past year behind us and embrace a new normal that includes providing enterprises and their employees with the ability to connect to business applications from anywhere in a safe and secure manner.

With Silver Peak now part of Aruba, our ability to help our enterprises to successfully transform their WAN and security architectures and advance digital transformation has never been greater. With so many exciting advancements in WAN edge technologies, including the acceleration of IoT adoption, advancements in automation and AI along with new transport technologies emerging, we’re continuing to accelerate the transformation of the network edge.

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For the third consecutive year, Silver Peak has been recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.

This has been a tremendous year for Silver Peak and we believe being one of only two companies to be positioned as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure from the beginning is another major milestone. When you couple this with our recent acquisition by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, which has been recognized as a Visionary in the most recent report, we are confident you can quickly see why customers are excited about our ability to deliver the most comprehensive and innovative edge-to-cloud solution.

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When I founded Silver Peak 15 years ago, we set out on a singular mission: to help our customers build a better WAN.  Our focus has been on architecting solutions, and building a company dedicated to connecting users to applications with greater ease, efficiency and effectiveness. We’ve done this through two generations of enterprise IT architecture, first with WAN optimization primarily focused on accelerating data center hosted applications, and then over the last five years with SD-WAN to address the broad adoption of cloud and SAAS services, and providing enterprises with a multiplier effect on their digital transformation initiatives. Everything we have done is with the goal of delivering the highest quality of experience to users when interacting with business applications and services in mind.

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We've seen many transformative changes in the market over the past few years. In 2019, for example, we witnessed router-centric and basic SD-WAN offerings beginning to fall short of expectations as enterprises began shifting toward a business-first networking model. We also saw an emphasis on cloud security, along with a bond forming between SD-WAN and UCaaS. We began to see a new set of emerging requirements for multi-cloud deployments, and the promise of 5G beginning to materialize.

So, what's in store for 2020? This is sure to mark another year of continued WAN transformation and a year in which enterprises can begin to realize a multiplier effect from their cloud investments. As the market continues to gain momentum, here are my annual predictions for SD-WAN and the future of the WAN edge infrastructure market.

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We’re two for two! This week Gartner published its 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, and I’m proud to report that once again Silver Peak has been positioned in the Leader’s quadrant.

Last year Gartner published the inaugural 2018 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, providing enterprise decision makers with a comprehensive assessment of the changing requirements for a modern WAN, Gartner listened to thousands of enterprise customers, reviewed each vendor’s solution in detail and analyzed their completeness of vision and ability to execute. The published report talks about Gartner’s view of the Leaders, Challengers, Niche Players and Visionaries in the rapidly changing WAN edge infrastructure market.

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For the past three years, SD-WAN has been one of the most talked about technology trends. All the discussion around SD-WAN has helped shine the spotlight on the business value enterprises can realize by changing the way they build their wide area networks.

As the market continues to gain momentum coming into the new year, here are my annual predictions for SD-WAN and the future of the WAN edge infrastructure market. You can also view Silver Peak’s webinar to prepare for SD-WAN in 2019.

SD-WAN Market Consolidation

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For the past three years, the software-defined WAN or SD-WAN, has been one of the most talked about technology trends. By some estimations there are 60+ vendors, all marketing their products around the concept of SD-WAN, each vying to carve out a piece of this emerging multi-billion-dollar market. While all the discussion and hype around SD-WAN has helped shine the spotlight on the business value enterprises can realize by changing the way they build their wide area networks, it has also led to confusion and in some cases delays of adoption.

That is why today’s release of the first ever 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure is such an important milestone for us. Gartner has long been one of the most influential industry analyst firms in the world, providing highly credible perspectives on technology vendors and markets. By listening to thousands of enterprise customers, reviewing each vendor’s solution in detail and analyzing their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, they have published a comprehensive report to provide their view of the Leaders, Challengers, Niche Players and Visionaries in this rapidly changing market (to get a copy of the WAN Edge Magic Quadrant click here). This new Gartner Magic Quadrant recognizes 20 vendors based on their Ability to Execute and their Completeness of Vision.

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With the beginning of the new year, it’s popular to opine on what the new year might bring in terms of technology advances. My predictions for the WAN in 2018 have been covered in several publications here, here and here. In this blog, I’m going to expand on one of my predictions: how the new WAN edge enables improved security architectures. I believe there are three primary ways the new WAN edge will enable improved security architectures for enterprises building an SD-WAN.

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I gave a keynote presentation at MEF and answered two questions that I’m commonly asked:

1. What’s next after SD-WAN?
2. What’s the relationship between SD-WAN and NFV?

If you’ve read my previous blogs, you can probably guess my answer to the first question. I believe the software-defined WAN must evolve into the self-driving WAN. By augmenting automation with machine learning and AI, we can build WANs that dynamically translate business intent into action, with central orchestration working in tandem with the WAN edge. For this blog, I will focus on answering the second question.

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Enterprises adopt cloud-first WAN architectures

Today, most WAN traffic, to and from branch and remote sites, is destined for the cloud, either to SaaS services or applications hosted in an IaaS environment. The traditional WAN was architected for branch-to-data-center traffic flows, not to efficiently support new cloud-driven traffic patterns. Starting in 2018, most enterprises will adopt a “cloud-first” SD-WAN architecture designed to efficiently and effectively support the ongoing evolution in their application mix.

The new WAN edge replaces the traditional branch router

Traditional routers are no longer the default choice for branch deployments. Routers are burdened by three decades of complexity and a cumbersome “CLI-first” device-by-device configuration paradigm. With SD-WAN as a foundation, a new class of centrally-orchestrated, application-driven WAN edge devices will replace traditional routers in the branch.

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The migration of applications to the cloud is motivating enterprises to rethink how they architect their WANs, and this in turn has created the SD-WAN market category. The recent acquisition of VeloCloud by VMware, and of Viptela by Cisco earlier in the year, represent attempts by two of the bigger players in IT to stake a claim in this fast-growing new market.

While it’s convenient to place products into categories, there are many approaches to SD-WAN, each focused on a different use case or customer base. It was not unexpected to see Cisco go for Viptela. Of all the SD-WAN solutions, Viptela is arguably the one that most closely emulates a traditional router, including conventional device-by-device CLI-based configuration, with a limited amount of central orchestration. It certainly represents the least disruptive approach for Cisco, and gives them an angle to extend the life of the old Swiss army knife known as the ISR.

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When SD-WAN first began capturing the media spotlight in 2015, many carriers initially viewed SD-WAN as a potential threat to their business.

Fast forward two years and it’s become clear that SD-WAN provides a new way for service providers to address the changing connectivity needs of the enterprise. As enterprise applications migrate to the cloud, a new set of opportunities has emerged for advanced managed service offerings.

Recognizing SD-WAN’s Many Benefits

While some of the initial messaging around SD-WAN focused on the potential cost savings of using broadband connectivity, there are in fact many other and more important drivers for SD-WAN that include:

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SD-WAN is taking off.

A year ago we announced 100 paying, deployed EdgeConnect SD-WAN customers. Earlier this month, we announced our 400^th customer deployment, representing a quadrupling of our SD-WAN customer base in just 12 months.

We are seeing our Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution deployed globally, across a wide range of industries including financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and transport. Our customers are simplifying and consolidating their WAN edge infrastructure, reducing operating costs and delivering an improved IT experience to their distributed workforce.

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In my last few blogs I’ve talked about the journey from the Software Defined WAN to the Self-Driving WAN. Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to the WAN might seem futuristic, but it’s already happening with our Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution. A great example is our revolutionary First-packet iQ application classification technology which we announced at the end of March.

Traditional Application Classification

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I realize that the idea of a ‘Self-driving’ WAN could seem like science fiction. But if you think of the visions propelling companies like Google, Tesla and Amazon, you can begin to realize how big an impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have in the next few years, both on our personal lives—and the way IT runs enterprises.

MOVING FROM AUTOMATED TO AUTONOMOUS

Enterprises are already turning to Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions to connect employees consistently and securely to applications—whether the applications are in the data center or the cloud.

Automation plays a key role in these current SD-WAN offerings, eliminating many of the repetitive and mundane manual steps required to configure and connect remote offices and branch locations.

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