Cisco was listed with the largest revenue in the recently released worldwide market share for SD-WAN equipment. Cisco’s market share was 16.2% in Q2 2019, increasing from 14.6% in Q1 2019. The details are covered in the September 2019 report titled “Market Share: Enterprise Network Equipment by Market Segment, Worldwide, 2Q19.”
As head of global marketing at Viptela, one major milestone that Viptela achieved (before the acquisition) was driving the penetration within Fortune 500 companies. Surprisingly many of those early adopters were healthcare and financial companies, typically the most conservative. But such was the testament of the technology meeting their compliance needs. Now Cisco SD-WAN powers 70% of the Fortune 100 deployments.
There has been a steady cadence of big milestones on Cisco SD-WAN. In 2018, Viptela was fully integrated into the IOS XE software that powers the flagship routing architectures. And later that year, Cisco led the industry with comprehensive security integration into SD-WAN with the Umbrella architecture. Combined with the Meraki solution, Cisco can now address the full range of enterprise requirements.
On the customer front the milestones have been even more commendable. Cisco SD-WAN now drives many large enterprises with deployments over 1000 sites, including CircleK a retailer with more than 15,000 locations. At CiscoLive 2018, CircleK was migrating at a stunning 500 locations per month to SD-WAN. This makes Cisco SD-WAN technology stand out in terms of scale.
But the full power of this integration was on display when I took the stage to deliver the keynote with Anthony Wild from Johnsonville Sausages at the ONUG 2019 conference in NYC. The company actually did a live cut-through from traditional WAN to SD-WAN globally. But more importantly, Anthony executed the transformation on his existing Cisco ISR routers that had been running in his network for five-years. This showed the power of how software is transforming rigid areas of infrastructure. But for Anthony this was just a step in his Intent-Based Networking vision journey. Anthony seems to really “dislike operational siloes”.
Why was the Gartner report for wan edge delayed?
Joe, I think Gartner would be the rightful entity to comment on this.
Hello,
Nice article. Am curious if you know if that data includes revenue where the Cisco practice is to give free Viptela to customers that don’t use it? The example is a large New England Insurance company.
It will be interesting if you allow this truthful post to be up as it is not a derogatory comment. Only fair to your readers.
Thanks!
Great point, Chuck, and thank you for contributing to the discussion!
I also wonder if it is a requirement to have actually deployed it or if it counts if it is just shelf-ware? I seem to encounter a lot of organizations that halted the roll-out due to unforeseen issues. Would be great to dig into this further.
Cisco indeed has multiple promotions for enterprises to try its technology: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/promotions-free-trials.html
Cisco doesn’t share revenue information with Gartner or other analysts. So its Gartner’s independent methodology in evaluating it.
Not doubting that Cisco has a large part of SD-WAN marketshare but would love to see the data behind the statement “70% of the Fortune 100 use Cisco SD-WAN” since 70% of the Fortune 100 have not yet adopted SD-WAN. Unless of course you are counting any ISR installed that has the capability of using Viptela code (but not using is as a SD-WAN) then you are manipulating the numbers. Let’s have honest representations of the numbers not marketing fake news.
Bill, it represents deployments of SD-WAN (and not traditional ISRs). And it could be in different stages of deployments.
So you stand by the statement that 70% of the Fortune 100 use Cisco SD-WAN?? Kinda impossible since just this alone would exceed Gartner, IDC and IHS numbers of what has been sold not even counting all the other SD-WAN vendor’s sales. As someone that works for an analyst firm, I find these baseless claims disturbing and mis-leading.
Agree that the numbers don’t make sense. In addition, as a reseller of SD-WAN and normally a Cisco shop, I have run into numerous issues doing POCs with Viptela including failing using VoIP. Cisco could not fix. Had to bring in Silver Peak which out-performed in performance, scale and easily passed the VoIP POC.
Todd, I am sorry to hear your experience. There are numerous voice optimization features that are now factored into the product.
Mike, that question is better directed to Investor Relations.
But you made the claim
Mike, my earlier response confirmed the 70% number for Fortune 100 customer. I am sorry if that was unclear. Its just that I cannot comment on your math, and that will need to be directed to IR.
Why would you give a link to a report that we have to pay for? #novalue
James, I apologize for that inconvenience. We are referencing the source of that information as per Gartner policies.
IDC mentioned that Cisco SD-WAN market share is 46% while Gartner is stating it’s 16%. That’s a huge difference. Which one is correct ?
https://www.crn.com/news/networking/cisco-leads-1-4b-sd-wan-infrastructure-market-idc
Great observation. Both IDC and Gartner use different methodologies, still that is indeed a big difference. One major factor is that the Meraki SD-WAN numbers are excluded from the Gartner report. Meraki has been a strong player within SD-WAN, but Gartner still atrributes those numbers to the UTM market reports; but this might change in the future. The IDC report however consolidates both Viptela and Meraki products.
What is your definition of Fortune 100 ? Does Cisco have a separate list than what’s publicly known? Many of the companies listed in the infographic showing 70% adoption aren’t even Fortune 100!
Totally misleading and far from truth..
That’s a valid observation. The picture represents the gamut of Cisco SD-WAN customers across all industries. It is taken from a presentation at the recent Partner Summit. The picture makes an extra point about ‘70% of the Fortune 100 using Cisco SD-WAN’. We define Fortune 100 as the top 100 companies within the Fortune 500. I hope that clarifies.
Wow, quite a back and forth. I was also puzzled by this.
First of all, if 70% of Fortune 100 has large scale deployments, Cisco’s market share would be higher than a supposedly market-leading, but still paltry, 16.4%. Where did the days when Cisco owned 65%+ of a market or didn’t bother?
Second of all, I find it kind of questionable to sneak in the home-grown claim of “70% of Fortune 100” into a blog that cites the Gartner market share report, thanks making it look like that prior 70% is validated by Gartner by association. Not sure this falls within Gartner’s usage rules, but that’s for them to establish.
I have no doubt that Cisco is among the top 3 Sd-WAN vendors, because that’s been validated by pretty much every market study and it makes sense. By Cisco standards, 16.4% is probably not very high. And the 70% of Fotune 100 claim is utterly and totally unsupported.
Those are good concerns you raise. It allows me to clarify some gaps in my blog. Indeed the market is expecting a higher number based on our traction, but we do not share revenue numbers with Gartner or other analysts. There is one important gap in the Gartner report though, it excludes numbers by Meraki SD-WAN. Jointly, both Cisco SD-WAN products now count 20,000 customers. The IDC report does include Meraki and shows both products at 46%. I hope that clarifies the matter for you. Here is the link: https://www.crn.com/news/networking/cisco-leads-1-4b-sd-wan-infrastructure-market-idc
I tried to avoid confusion and restricted this blog to factual data. But your comment helped me to close the missing link of the IDC report. This clarification will help other readers as well.
Why is Meraki SD-WAN never specifically called out? These reports always seem to focus on Viptela.
You are absolutely correct. The Meraki solution should have been included by Gartner in this market share report, but Gartner is factoring those revenues as UTM, and, thus, it is as yet missing. My hope is that Gartner can fix this issue soon. However the IDC report does include both Meraki and Viptela. And as you can read, the joint portfolio is super strong. We are at 20,000 customers across both.
https://blogs.cisco.com/enterprise/relentless-customer-focus-drives-cisco-sd-wan-to-market-leadership