SASE Revenue Grows 34%, with Cisco, Zscaler, VMware Leading

Cisco led a “crowded” secure access service edge (SASE) market in terms of revenue in 2022, according to a Dell’Oro Group report.

Cisco had 17% of SASE revenue share in the research firm’s latest SASE & SD-WAN report. However, the industry is growing as a whole, and Zscaler only trailed Cisco by a single percentage point. The overall SASE market grew 34% year-over-year in revenue in 2022, according to Dell’Oro.

Dell’Oro Group’s Mauricio Sanchez

“For the third consecutive year, SASE revenue growth topped 30% as the pandemic-fueled need to modernize the network and security architecture for branch offices and hybrid users continued,” said Mauricio Sanchez, Dell’Oro’s research director for network security and SASE and SD-WAN.

Dell’Oro listed Broadcom/Symantec as third place in overall SASE revenue share. Although Broadcom is working on closing its purchase of VMware, Sanchez said VMware’s revenue didn’t factor in. Broadcom’s security service edge (SSE) revenue did enough to put it on the SASE podium.

Secure access service edge involves the integration of advanced security features with SD-WAN into a cloud-based platform. Dell’Oro used its latest report to share how the market breaks down into different delivery models, and how those respective vendors are performing. Approximately 30 vendors exist in the industry, though their models all vary.

Networking vs. Security vs. Both

First, Dell’Oro views SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) and SSE (secure service edge) as the two key technologies comprising SASE. While 15 vendors provide the SD-WAN component (including Huawei and Arista), 26 provide the SSE component (including Google, Akamai and Netskope). The SSE side of the SASE market accounts for almost 60% of total revenue, according to Dell’Oro. SSE grew 38% in revenue last year, while SD-WAN grew 30% in revenue.

Eleven of those vendors provide both SD-WAN and SASE. As a result, Dell’Oro classifies them as “single-vendor” providers. Those are Aruba, Aryaka, Cato, Check Point, Cisco, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Juniper, Palo Alto, Versa and VMware. Single-vendor SASE accounted 45% of the overall SASE market, but it is enjoying faster growth.

“Single-vendor SASE solutions grew faster as a reflection of greater enterprise preference for one-stop-shop versus multi-vendor best-of-breed,” Sanchez said.

Furthermore, Dell’Oro divvies up SASE providers by whether they put its various technological components on a single platform. Those who converge it all into the same place earn the title of “unified SASE,” while the others go as “disaggregated SASE.” Only Aryaka, Cato, Versa and VMware counted as unified SASE in Dell’Oro’s book. Moreover, Versa, VMware and Cato led that subcategory in 2022 revenue. And Dell’Oro concludes that unified SASE is growing at a faster rate than disaggregated SASE.

Cisco, Fortinet and VMware led the SD-WAN market in revenue.