SD-WAN is going Mainstream…

SDWAN remains a topic of high interest among Gartner clients. While many networking technologies are over-hyped as the next big thing, SDWAN is delivering on the promise. In just three short years, adoption has taken off and we now estimate 6,000+ paying SDWAN customers with more than 4,000 production implementations. We recommend you look at SDWAN when refreshing WAN edge equipment, renegotiating a carrier contract, building out new branches, or aggressively moving apps to the cloud (among other reasons).

SDWAN has several very real and tangible benefits (cost, performance, availability to name a few) with clear ROI when compared to alternatives.  In fact, this is what is driving rapid adoption. However, one question that often comes up with clients is “what are the downsides” or “it sounds to good too be true”.  With that as the backdrop, here are some of the downsides (or “challenges” as the marketers call them) affiliated with early SDWAN deployments…

• Substantial functionality gaps exist with many well-known SDWAN vendors/products. For example, features that are missing from many SDWAN products include T1/E1 interfaces, integrated 4G/LTE capability, Wan Optimization, and even support for IPv6. This will change and vendors are adding these capabilities as we speak, but at this point in time, most vendors don’t have them all.
• SDWAN can facilitate a move towards lower-cost Internet transport, but this can lead to challenges in managing heterogeneous connectivity.  MPLS did something that everyone knows about, but that most people don’t really appreciate – manage that last mile.  I’ve talked to many SDWAN early adopters that started bringing in lots of Inet connections only to find that the heterogeneous nature of vendor and/or service offerings prompted them to bring in a third party aggregator to manage it, or go with a higher cost provider with a larger footprint.
• Despite the name, there’s a good bit of hardware involved as most SDWAN vendors lead with hardware appliances in accounts.
• While SDWAN is much easier to configure and operate than traditional routers (probably 10X when making complex application routing policy), many SDWAN implementations have actually added technical debt to the branch. This is because many of the early adopters are not actually replacing an existing router (at least not yet) for a variety of reasons including aversion to risk, lack of functionality, etc… Instead they are placing it behind and/or in conjunction with the existing router. I anticipate this will (and should) change soon.

For reference, our most recent SDWAN research is here:

Technology Insight for Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN)
Summary: SD-WAN is an early mainstream technology that offers several benefits compared to traditional, router-based WANs. I&O leaders responsible for planning, sourcing and managing WANs can reduce costs and improve agility and uptime by using SD-WAN products.

Market Guide for WAN Edge Infrastructure

Summary: WAN edge infrastructure is changing rapidly as I&O leaders responsible for networking face dynamic business requirements, including changing application architectures. This guide covers a fragmented vendor and technology landscape, with a focus on the increasingly relevant topics of SD-WAN and vCPE.

Regards, Andrew