Cisco was dropped from the Leader quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs ) while Silver Peak was added to the prestigious list.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is one of the more thorough, independent analyses in the WAN optimization market today. It evaluates the top vendors in a segment across 15 areas mapped along two axes - their ability to execute and their completeness of vision.
Disclosure: Silver Peak is one of my clients and I own stock options in the company.
Once again, Riverbed was positioned as the market leader, despite recent negative publicity around forcing Expand customers to upgrade their hardware.
Silver Peak was the new entrant in this year’s Leader quadrant. The company has been making its way up the Magic Quadrant for the past three years. Three years ago, Silver Peak was listed in the Niche Player section only to grow to a Visionary last year and finally to a Leader this year. The company’s data center-class strategy has gotten strong marks from Gartner in the past and this year was helped by its continued emphasis on replication, large portfolio of appliances, its global expansion and the introduction of the first, free, data center-class WAN optimizer. The company still does not offer capabilities for home office and mobile users and Branch Office in a Box (BOB) capabilities.
Where there were winners there were losers. Making room for Silver Peak in the Leaders quadrant was Cisco who fell to the Challengers quadrant. “Cisco is a slow follower whose vision is limited to an incremental product road map,” writes Gartner. Similarly, Blue Coat System dropped to the bottom of the Leaders quadrant in part because “Revenue has been stagnant” and because it’s “been late with features.”
You can read the Magic Quadrant for yourself here.
