Four Years in a Row: VMware Named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure

I am pleased and proud to announce that VMware has been named as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for WAN Edge Infrastructure - for an amazing fourth year in a row. Amongst 15 vendors, VMware is positioned furthest overall for its Completeness of Vision.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure has been published for four years. Each of those years, VMware has been named a Leader. I would like to take a moment to thank our tens of thousands of customers and hundreds of partners around the world - and especially our VMware SD-WAN and VMware SASE teams - whose commitment, trust, and hard work have brought us this far.

"To support the growing number of distributed users (and their devices and services), the industry is taking WAN Edge networking, security, and services to the next level with SASE. VMware continues to advance its SASE platform and we believe the Gartner recognition of VMware SD-WAN, a core component of VMware SASE, validates our position to support customers as they face a new edge reality."

Sanjay Uppal, SVP and General Manager, Service Provider and Edge, VMware, in a press release

Our vision: From WAN edge to SASE to the next evolution

Cloud-native VMware SD-WAN has been at the leading edge of the trends toward moving enterprise applications to the cloud, working from anywhere, and defining everything through software. SD-WAN is a key technology in the transition from legacy hardware to software-defined networks that are flexible, scalable, resilient, and easy to manage.

In the blog we published in 2018 on the first occasion of being named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, we called SD-WAN a necessary component of modern network infrastructure: "SD-WAN has, in a very small period of time, transitioned from a networking 'nice-to-have' to a necessary component of the network infrastructure, providing the connectivity across cloud, data center, branches, end user, and applications regardless of where they will be used."

What we said in 2018 holds true today, and we believe it will remain an even stronger piece of the networking story in years to come. The advent of secure access service edge (SASE) bolstered SD-WAN's position as a necessary component of modern networking.

SASE, which includes SD-WAN, is an idea that could not have come at a better time. It was defined by Gartner in 2019. By 2020, with millions of people around the globe suddenly working from home, enterprises quickly embraced SASE.

Combining SD-WAN with cloud-based security-as-a-service with SASE allows businesses to apply full security protections to users anywhere, without having to set up and maintain point products at each location. VMware SASE enables highly reliable, secure, and efficient access for users located anywhere to applications on any cloud, while protecting users and infrastructure against internal and external threats.

The pace of change at the Edge in networking, security, and compute infrastructure is only accelerating. Today, enterprise architectures are highly distributed. This distribution, or disaggregation, is even spreading to traditionally centralized telecommunications networks, allowing communications service providers to take advantage of rapidly evolving technologies, for example 5G in the radio access network (RAN). SASE and SD-WAN are still a key part of this evolution - this time as services that run in a multi-cloud edge platform.

You can learn more about VMware's Edge vision at VMworld 2021, when Sanjay Uppal presents his solution keynote, The Future of Distributed Enterprise Edge Runs through Service Providers.

Our execution: Proven and secure global fabric

VMware SD-WAN and VMware SASE are cloud-native, scalable, proven solutions. VMware's broad and deep networking portfolio includes these advantages:

• A global network of more than 150 SASE points of presence (PoPs) delivered through VMware and its partners. This multi-tenant platform provides secure access to public and private cloud applications. The PoPs' geographic distribution and one-stop-shop architecture provides ultra-low latency that can reach 85% of the world's major population centers with a sub-10ms response.
• The PoPs include the entire VMware SASE solution portfolio: VMware SD-WAN, VMware SASE, VMware Secure Access ™, VMware Cloud Web Security™, and VMware Edge Network Intelligence™. Their open architecture makes it easy to integrate compute, additional security, and other services.
• The solution provides advanced analytics and intelligence about application performance, providing end-to-end visibility from the end device to the PoP to the application.
• VMware's unique Dynamic Multipath Optimization™ (DMPO) boosts the capacity and service capabilities of Internet and hybrid links. The solution continuously monitors circuits, recognizes more than 3,000 business-critical applications and steers them to the optimal link, and remediates connectivity for priority applications even in severely degraded network conditions.
• All of this is managed through a single pane of glass - one interface to manage business policies that span multiple security and network services.

Download the report to find out more about why VMware was named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.

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Gartner citation and disclosure

Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, Jonathan Forest, Naresh Singh, Andrew Lerner, Evan Zeng, 20 September 2021

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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