While VMware, Aryaka and Silver Peak stood on the podium as the top SD-WAN vendors in the first quarter, Huawei was way out of the running.
Overall, SD-WAN revenue reached $162 million in this year's first quarter, which marked a 12% increase over the previous quarter, according to research by IHS Markit. Compared to last year's first quarter, SD-WAN appliance and management software grew 2.3x year-over-year.
Last year VMware bought VeloCloud, which helped put it on top of the first-quarter SD-WAN revenue standings at $31.6 million. Aryaka nabbed the silver medal with $29.1 million in first-quarter revenue, while Silver Peak had $20.2 million.
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Huawei struggled to the finish line with only $1.8 million in first quarter revenue, which was down 45% compared to the previous fourth quarter. IHS Markit's Cliff Grossner, senior research director and adviser for cloud and data center, said he didn't read too much into Huawei's first quarter results.
"Their revenue is rather small and choppy, and it really depends on what deals they close in the quarter," he said in an email to FierceTelecom. "For the long term, I do not like to make these predictions, but you can bet that Cisco and VMware are in the market to stay. Both Silver Peak and Aryaka have strong existing client bases and solid but very different go to market strategies and will be solid contenders.
Grossner said there were also strong contenders in the "other" category of the report, including Nuage Networks.
Having proved itself as a viable business case, IHS Markit said that SD-WAN, which is a maturing market, would reach $861 million worldwide this year with the early adopters expanding their existing deployments. SD-WAN is now ramping up in compliance-sensitive verticals, such as the healthcare and financial.
Grossner said that many SD-WAN vendors were starting to incorporate analytics, utilize rich telemetry data into SD-WAN management platforms, and enable enterprises to monitor application traffic flow between multicloud environments.