I am excited to share that Cisco, once again, secured a leadership position in Gartner 2016 WAN Optimization Magic Quadrant. This comes shortly after the Best of Interop win in Las Vegas for Cisco Enterprise NFV. According to the report, Leaders in this Magic Quadrant have a broad feature set, including QoS, generic compression, protocol acceleration and file system acceleration, with the majority of features proved in substantial real-world implementations. In my opinion, these recent recognitions are a testament to Cisco's Digital Network Architecture solutions in providing an open, software-driven, service-centric network to accelerate our customers' digital transformation initiatives.

(Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization, May 2016. G00276843)

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The Winning Factors

I believe this recognition is a result of Cisco's abilities to address key market needs:

1. Delivering network services convergence and secure cloud app performance via Direct Internet Access for SaaS applications, which now includes asymmetric deployment
2. Robust offerings providing our customers with flexible deployment choice
   • As standard virtual machine on a hypervisor of choice -vWAAS on VMWare ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, or KVM on an x86;
   • As router integrated solution -vWAAS on a UCS-E Series compute blade hosted on the ISR 4000;
   • As virtual container in the IOS XE operation system; and
   • As virtual network function supported by Cisco Enterprise NFV solution.
3. Met and exceeded hybrid WAN and software defined (SD-WAN) requirements:
   • Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) passed all 10 SD-WAN business requirements as denoted by the ONUG in New York last year and met the criteria set forth by Gartner, Market Guide for SD-WAN Summary of Requirements, Dec 2015 (G00279081).
   • Cisco WAN Opt solution goes beyond these basic requirements by offering:
     • Open integration with 3^rdparty solutions;
     • Both physical and virtual platforms;
     • Flexible consumption models: DIY, partner, or managed services and license portability with Cisco ONE for investment protection; and
     • On-demand network services with Cisco Enterprise NFV.

Download the full Gartner MQ WAN Optimization report here, and check out Anna Duong's post on Cisco Enterprise Network Communities for an insider view of Cisco WAN Opt Vision and Strategy.

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