Company Updates

Initial Thoughts on Gartner’s New SD-WAN Magic Quadrant and Capabilities Analysis

By Dan Maier

Chief Marketing Officer, Versa Networks
October 7, 2024

The industry news of the day is that Gartner simultaneously published the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SD-WAN along with its more granular 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for SD-WAN companion report ranking SD-WAN services for specific use cases. Please feel free to download your own complimentary copies at the above links. Based on research by Gartner analysts @Jonathan Forest, @Nauman Raja, and @Karen Brown, all three with more than 20 years industry experience in enterprise networking, the two reports give Gartner’s take on the vendors that customers should consider, what to look for, and where the technology is heading. 

Five years running 

It provides a certain satisfaction to the Versa team and certainly some type of additional validation for our over 20,000 SD-WAN enterprise customers globally to see that Gartner has included Versa as a “Leader” in SD-WAN (for the fifth year in a row). This on top of the fact that Versa has also been recognized by Gartner in the most recent Magic Quadrants for Security Service Edge and Single-Vendor SASE product categories, respectively – one of only three global vendors to appear in all three product categories. All of these products run on our single, unified VersaONE platform. 

‘Excellent’ across all use cases 

In the “Critical Capabilities for SD-WAN” report, products were scored according to nine capabilities which were then applied to five use cases:  

1. WAN for small branches;  

2. Large hybrid WAN;  

3. On-premises security-sensitive WAN;  

4. Cloud-first WAN; and 

5. Partner-integrated cloud security.  

There’s certainly not a lot I would want to add to Gartner’s summary statement in its discussion of Versa, “Versa Secure SD-WAN scores as excellent for all five use cases,” only noting that Versa’s solution was ranked first out of all vendors in the Large Hybrid WAN use case, and was the only SD-WAN offering whose score ranked it in the top five in every use case evaluated, which I interpret as a reflection on the breadth and depth and maturity of our SD-WAN capabilities. 

The future belongs to SASE 

One strategic planning assumption underpinning both reports that commands attention is that, looking ahead just three years to 2027, nearly two-thirds of new SD-WAN purchases made will be an integrated part of a single-vendor SASE purchase, representing triple the proportion today. This is both remarkable – that’s a big swing in a short period for a large market – and unremarkable, given the inexorable logic of the convergence of networking and security. 

Food for mature thought 

While the Magic Quadrant evaluation appropriately puts a “High” weighting on innovation (described in the “Evaluation Criteria” section), the Critical Capabilities report recommends that infrastructure and operations leaders select vendors that only offer “good enough” functionality. I’m not quite sure how to reconcile this. The idea might be connected to the observation in the Magic Quadrant report that SD-WAN is a mature market, and therefore several vendors might be able to fulfill your needs. But here at Versa, we don’t see customers asking for “good enough” – on the contrary, we see significant demand for innovation and extension of SD-WAN capabilities to many new environments and use cases.  

At the end of the day, we are honored to be included in the Leaders quadrant for the 5^th year in a row, and we don’t intend to stop innovating anytime soon – our goal for our customers is certainly to be dramatically better than “good enough”. 

Onward.