In 2017, enterprise network teams across Asia-Pacific were deciding whether to rebuild their wide area networks around software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) instead of extending traditional MPLS circuits. Frost & Sullivan’s end-user surveys were among the main sources of data on that choice. They tracked why companies were interested, how far deployments had got and what was holding them back.
The question the surveys asked
Frost & Sullivan’s 2016 survey caught the SD-WAN market as it was navigating through the early adopter stage. The central question was practical. Could internet links, managed by an overlay, take over work that had been done by private MPLS circuits, and what would businesses gain?
The analyst firm’s reasoning, as reported by Silver Peak, which sponsored later research, was that enterprises need not rely on MPLS links alone for multi-site connectivity. They could consider hybrid WANs that combined inexpensive, widely available internet links with private, reliable MPLS. Frost & Sullivan said the appeal was strongest among organisations with many distributed branches, such as retail, healthcare, banking and financial services, and education.
What the survey data showed
The firm repeated its survey in 2018. Its title summarised the shift: in the two years since 2016, enterprise decision makers had developed a much better understanding of what SD-WAN offers. The title also said that deployment rates had doubled, that superior WAN performance was a key driver and that MPLS usage remained strong.
A separate global survey, sponsored by Silver Peak and announced by Frost & Sullivan in August 2018, gave more detail. It covered 850 companies across five industries in eight countries. Its main findings:
- 33% of companies had deployed SD-WAN or had a deployment under way, and 61% planned to deploy it within 12 to 24 months.
- Banking and financial services companies showed the greatest potential for deployment in that period.
- 61% of global respondents planned to use cloud-based security services chained to their SD-WAN.
- In Australia, the top three reasons for turning to SD-WAN were deploying new branch sites faster, applying granular security policies and improving WAN and application performance.
The data also undercut the idea that SD-WAN would simply replace MPLS. The survey indicated that enterprises were choosing dual internet or Ethernet and internet links for some sites, while keeping MPLS at critical sites. A report on the survey noted that there had been a lot of hype around internet links replacing MPLS, but the findings indicated otherwise.
The same research found that companies were not discarding existing equipment all at once. Respondents wanted SD-WAN appliances with integrated routing and WAN optimisation, while keeping existing customer-premises equipment at other sites until maintenance contracts expired. On buying models, the market was almost evenly split between fully managed services and do-it-yourself or co-managed approaches.
How the picture developed
Speed of rollout stayed a leading motive in later Frost & Sullivan research. In a survey cited by Silver Peak, 45% of respondents rated speed to deployment of new sites as the top reason for adopting SD-WAN. Optimised cloud connectivity and cost savings followed, each chosen by 43%. That is a different survey from the 2017 coverage of the topic, and its figures should not be mixed with those of other studies.
Later Frost & Sullivan surveys moved the question on from whether to adopt SD-WAN to how to run it. In its 2023 global survey of 1,390 decision makers, the most cited challenge in deploying SD-WAN was ensuring interoperability with the existing WAN. In the same research, 50% of respondents had started at least one SD-WAN deployment and 34% had started a SASE deployment.
The firm’s more recent work on managed services points the same way. Its 2025 forecast for North America put managed SD-WAN revenue growth at a compound annual rate of 14.8% from 2024 to 2029. A Frost Radar report reached the same conclusion on provider choice: 92% of North American organisations preferred managed or co-managed SD-WAN.
For network planners in 2017, the evidence in these surveys favoured a staged rebuild. Internet-based links and an SD-WAN overlay went first at branches, and MPLS stayed where reliability mattered most.