For the third consecutive year, Silver Peak has been recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.
This has been a tremendous year for Silver Peak and we believe being one of only two companies to be positioned as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure from the beginning is another major milestone. When you couple this with our recent acquisition by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, which has been recognized as a Visionary in the most recent report, we are confident you can quickly see why customers are excited about our ability to deliver the most comprehensive and innovative edge-to-cloud solution.
Let’s talk a little about what we’re seeing in the market. There is a lot of discussion and in some cases, confusion in the market about whether SD-WAN and the architecture coined by Gartner, Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE (pronounced “sassy”) are one and the same. From our perspective, on their own, they are two different concepts, but combined they are hugely complementary when it comes to enabling WAN and security transformation for modern cloud-first enterprises.
We believe that SASE is not about simply adding next-generation firewall capabilities to SD-WAN or vice versa. It’s about taking advanced, best-in-class SD-WAN at the WAN edge and complementing it with best-in-class cloud-delivered security capabilities that include IPS/IDS, CASB, secure web gateway, ZTNA and data leak prevention. The new WAN edge needs to simultaneously integrate with cloud-delivered security, and at the same time address the on-prem security requirements such as a stateful firewall and advanced segmentation.
While some believe that selecting a single vendor for both SD-WAN and SASE is the correct approach, we believe that enterprises prefer to have options when it comes to security, and this is reinforced by the 100s of deployments we have alongside cloud-delivered security services from our partners like Zscaler, Netskope, Check Point and McAfee.
We have made the strategic decision to provide customers with the freedom of choice to deploy best-in-class security vendors with automated orchestration. Our advanced, automated orchestration and integration within the Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN edge platform enables customers to deploy multiple best-in-class security partners in minutes within the Unity Orchestrator™ management console.
Combining our advanced SD-WAN platform with the leading cloud security from acknowledged market leaders makes for a powerful, highly automated WAN and security transformation solution.
For customers focused on branch transformation, which involves updating LAN and Wi-Fi switching at the same time as enabling new WAN options, Aruba is a clear choice. We are confident, as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure for eight straight years1 and now a Visionary in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, not only will HPE (Aruba) help improve our execution and reach, but our customers now have the opportunity to implement best-in-class networking from the edge to the cloud.
Finally, one of the many synergies between Aruba and Silver Peak can be summed up with the “Customer First, Customer Last” mantra that Aruba team adheres to. I’ll write more about our focus on customer experience in a future blog, but for now, we remain steadfastly focused on making our customers successful and delivering the highest quality of experience. I believe it shows in our customer satisfaction ratings, the fact that our customers are continuing to deploy more EdgeConnect across their WANs and renew their deployments with Silver Peak.
We believe that this year’s Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure really put significant emphasis on security as it relates to SD-WAN, which is different from previous reports. Regardless though, one thing remains the same. Silver Peak, now a part of Aruba, remains a Magic Quadrant Leader.
(1) Appeared as Aruba Networks (2012-2013), Aruba (2014) .. in Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure report
