VMware and Cisco are engaged in a two-horse race for control of the SD-WAN market following a wave of consolidation and acquisitions, according to IHS Markit.
The research firm said VMware recently acquired the SD-WAN market leader by revenue share VeloCloud, which followed Cisco's acquisition of second-ranked Viptela in the first half of the year.
IHS Markit senior research director and adviser for cloud and data center solutions Cliff Grossner said there could be more consolidation ahead in the SD-WAN segment as vendors set out to add SD-WAN to their capability sets to support the multi-clouds enterprises are building.
“Currently, the majority of SD-WAN revenue is from appliances, with early deployments focused on rolling out devices at branch offices,” Grossner said.
“Moving forward, we expect a larger portion of SD-WAN revenue to come from control and management software as users increasingly adopt application visibility and analytics services.”
The total data center and SDN market grew around 5.4% sequentially in the first half of 2017 to $1.93 billion, IHS Markit said.
Cisco is the SDN market leader, followed by Arista, White Box, VMware and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. VMware meanwhile also leads the SDN controller market segment of the larger market.