Pictured: Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group.
The emerging market for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions is set for lift off, a leading analyst firm has predicted.
Dell’Oro Group has forecast the sector to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 116% over the next five years. SASE comprises the integration of SD-WAN, secure web gateway and firewall technologies, bringing networking and security into a unified, cloud-based service that has the power to increase the scalability, agility and security of the network while reducing the total cost of ownership, explained Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group.
“SASE holds great appeal because it unifies and simplifies networking and security across a wide variety of network use cases, ranging from larger headquarter and branch networks down to individual users,” he commented. “Over the next five years, we expect the initial thrust for SASE to come from small to medium enterprises, for whom unification and simplification rank high, but also expect larger enterprises to begin pivoting.”
He added that compared to the hardware side, software will account for the vast majority of SASE revenue and is expected to continue increasing its contribution over the next five years. The combination of software and hardware sold as physical appliances will account for the vast majority of SASE revenue in the near-term, said Sanchez, adding that in the long-term this will move to a SaaS model.
Another report from Dell’Oro has indicated that wide-area IoT technologies will be a growth vehicle for both operators and suppliers over the next five years.
“We have talked about IoT as a growth vehicle for the mobile infrastructure suppliers and the operators for a long time,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President and analyst with Dell’Oro Group. “And while this shift has taken a bit longer than some expected, the reality is that IoT adoption is gaining momentum and these technologies are starting to make a difference. As the 3GPP standard continues to evolve, the operators are in a unique position to leverage their existing LTE and 5G NR MBB investments and the networks can in many cases be easily upgraded with minimal incremental infrastructure investments to be better optimized for a wide range of IoT applications.”
In other news from Dell’Oro, it has been speculated that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators in data centres could be held up if existing hardware bottlenecks aren’t addressed. Dell’Oro analyst Baron Fung said AI is driving the need for specialized solutions at the chip and system level in the form of accelerated compute servers optimized for training and inference workloads at the data centre and at the edge. He added that specialized AI hardware is helping to accelerate workloads like image and speech recognition, security, and predictive analytics.
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