Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments across the globe to order citizens to stay at home and follow social distancing practices, resulting in an unprecedented number of people working from home. The cloud and advances in networking technology have made this possible.

With businesses across industries embracing the public cloud to host key applications, and with advances in residential broadband and wireless speeds, remote workers can access most enterprise applications from home. However, as remote workers compete for bandwidth with children attending virtual classrooms and others at home trying to stream entertainment, optimizing and prioritizing business applications on home networks has become critical.

Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology can optimize the available bandwidth for remote workers by giving higher priority to business traffic compared to social media, YouTube, and streaming service traffic; continuously monitoring the traffic path for packet loss and delay, and applying forward error correction to reduce packet loss and increase throughput; and using traffic-handling techniques to throttle less-critical application traffic.

In this report, the SD-WAN vendor market is the infrastructure market consisting of SD-WAN hardware and software. The SD-WAN overlay functionality is delivered using a physical or virtual appliance. While most vendors offer a physical hardware appliance that hosts the SD-WAN software, there are vendors that sell only the software (for example, Versa Networks); in this case, only software licensing revenues earned by a vendor are included.

The report reveals the market positioning of companies in an industry using their Growth and Innovation scores as highlighted in the report methodology. The document presents competitive profiles on each of the companies in the report based on their strengths, opportunities, and a small discussion on their positioning. The report analyzes hundreds of companies in the industry and benchmarks them across 10 criteria on the report, where the leading companies in the industry are then positioned. Industry leaders on both the Growth and Innovation indices are recognized as best practice recipients.