Research Overview

The North American managed software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) services market is in the growth phase of the product life cycle. Across industries, businesses are embracing these services as an integral part of their WAN transformation strategy, largely to gain cost and operational efficiencies. In 2020, market revenues exceeded $2 billion, with more than 180,000 sites operational today.

The economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic did impact technology spending in 2020 as highly distributed verticals such as retail and manufacturing were negatively impacted. However, vendors report that the market started to recover in Q4 2020. With the vaccination rollout, the North American and European markets are beginning to slowly recover. As businesses reassess their technology spend, SD-WAN will emerge as a top choice for their networking needs, which will contribute to higher growth rates beyond 2022.

In this Radar™ report, Frost & Sullivan focuses on 9 leading NSPs and MSPs that have full-fledged managed SD-WAN offerings in the market. Service providers are primarily analyzed based on their managed SD-WAN portfolios, which include but are not limited to: choice of SD-WAN vendor solutions; the underlay choices; managed service support before, during, and after deployment; self-service portals and network management capabilities; and the ability to deliver on value-added services to create customer stickiness (security, routing, VoIP, UCaaS). The competitive Radar™ mapping is based on full year 2020 quantitative data (a combination of operational sites and revenues) and features and functionalities that have been generally available in the market for at least six months.