What 451 Research Says About the SD-WAN Market

451 Research on SD-WAN Market
451 Research just released a report confirming market dynamics we at Aryaka are witnessing firsthand, thus sanctioning our differentiated position and potential for future growth.

The 451 Take on the SD-WAN Market

In the report, 451 states:

  • The SD-WAN market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25% between 2015 and 2012
  • By 2021 the SD-WAN market should be worth just under $1.5 billion
  • Start-ups, incumbents, and service providers are all scrambling to offer SD-WAN products designed to lower enterprise connectivity costs while also positioning customers to make better use of cloud applications.”((where does this quote start?))

The timing is right, 451 says, because legacy MPLS services that SD-WAN is meant to complement are getting long in the tooth and becoming increasingly irrelevant with the arrival of cloud.

Where Does SD-WAN Fit as an MPLS Alternative?

“MPLS circuits that [enterprises] have been employing for 20 years are rigid, inflexible, expensive, and ill-suited for cloud access,” 451 reports. “They require months to turn up and, although secure, reliable, and resilient and trusted, are too expensive to provision on demand to accommodate the dynamic nature of cloud computing.”

The SD-WAN suppliers looking to address MPLS limitations generally fall into three camps:

  • Incumbent network hardware suppliers
  • Startups that deliver SD-WAN appliances
  • Service providers, many of which are rolling out SD-WAN services based on the hardware from some of the SD-WAN newcomers

Virtually all of the players, however, build SD-WANs that use the public Internet for transport to complement existing MPLS facilities.  While that may be adequate for local connections within the US where Internet quality is generally good, global companies trying to use long distance, best-effort Internet-based SD-WANs will see huge fluctuations in link quality, resulting in radically different application experiences, sometimes involving response times of up to 4 seconds.

Aryaka’s Differentiator: Global SD-WAN

Aryaka takes a different approach.  We have a built a global private network with 28 points of presence that are within 30 milliseconds of 95% of the world’s working population.  SD-WAN traffic is piped into our network via short local Internet links (simplifying and speeding deployment worldwide), then rides our secure, optimized network to your data center or cloud/SaaS provider of choice.   Performance is backed by rock-solid SLAs, which we can offer where others cannot because we control the network virtually end-to-end.

“Aryaka’s differentiator … is a focus on global SD-WAN for improved cloud and on-premises application performance from its owned and operated global network and proprietary software stack,” 451 says.  “Aryaka’s ‘cloud-native’ private network is intended to appeal to globally distributed enterprises that may be reluctant to rely on the Internet for application delivery over long distances (especially for sites in remote geographies).”

This core difference is contributing to explosive growth:

  • Revenue grew 80%-100% in 2017
  • Customer count jumped from 300 to 800 enterprise customers today
  • Although we don’t reveal revenue, in the report “451 Research estimates annual revenue between $50m to $100m.”

And we’ll let 451 sum it up: “Aryaka has strong growth and clear differentiation in SD-WAN by owning and operating its own global private network.”

That is, indeed, what we are experiencing and believe, but it is reassuring to have an objective third party back it up.

451 concludes: “Aryaka markets its SD-WAN as an alternative to MPLS and separate WAN optimization appliances.  It’s looking to offer all the promise of SD-WAN – flexibility, agility, reduced cost, simplified management and optimized access to the cloud – but with a dedicated transport underlay that makes it possible to support SLAs for business-critical application delivery globally.”

We invite you to learn more about today’s SD-WAN market and Aryaka’s key differentiators.

About the author

Shehzad Karkhanawala
Shehzad is Director of Marketing at Aryaka. He leads public and analyst relations globally and demand generation as well as partner marketing activities for the Asia-Pacific region. Shehzad is an SD-WAN evangelist and often participates in webinars, events and discussions on the subject.