Startups with campus-focused network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings are positioned to capture a substantial portion of the greater NaaS market in the coming years, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group.
Campus NaaS, or CNaaS, is part of the larger NaaS market. It’s a service that delivers LAN equipment to enterprises and excludes the WAN and any cloud/storage services, Siân Morgan, research director at Dell’Oro Group, told Network World. “CNaaS is for the most part a subset of public cloud-managed LAN,” Morgan said. “The CNaaS technology tends to use public cloud-managed architectures.”
Dell’Oro Group segments the CNaaS market into three categories: enabler, turnkey, and LAN-as-a-utility.
- Enabler CNaaS is a service designed by a vendor to support MSPs that want to deliver CNaaS to enterprises.
- Turnkey CNaaS offerings are custom offerings targeted at large enterprises and delivered directly by vendors.
- LAN-as-a-utility offerings are based on new technology and often sold on an outcome basis. An enterprise purchases the service at a price that varies per square foot or per user, and it does not vary based on the amount of equipment that is installed. The LAN-as-a-utility category of CNaaS is dominated by vendors that are startups.
According to Dell’Oro’s report, startups offering LAN-as-a-utility solutions are expected to outpace other CNaaS providers in growth, with projections indicating they will command approximately one-third of all CNaaS revenues by 2028. Notable players in this space include Nile, Meter, Join Digital, and Ramen Networks, which are all actively expanding their deployment capabilities for the coming year.
The report shares ambitious projections for the industry, with the public cloud-managed LAN market expected to surpass $12 billion by 2028. While CNaaS deployments had a relatively slow initial uptake, the sector is forecast to generate annual revenues exceeding $940 million by 2028.
LAN-as-a-utility: Startup strengths and directions
Looking specifically at the LAN-as-a-utility space, Dell’Oro Group highlights startups Nile, Meter, Join Digital and Ramen Networks as growing fast.
Morgan noted that the startups have designed their own technology with the intent to disrupt the LAN equipment market.
“The LAN-as-a-Utility offers are designed to take share from incumbent equipment vendors,” she said. “However, with their innovative technology and business model, it is also possible for vendors to develop new use-cases which will grow the overall IT market.”
Not surprisingly, the startups tend to agree with Morgan’s analysis. Nile, Meter and Ramen Networks all have plans to continue to accelerate growth moving forward as well.
“We are building a NaaS solution for the uncarpeted enterprise,” Partho Mishra, CEO of Ramen Networks, told Network World. “We continued to see rapid growth in customer deployments.”
Rishit Lakhani, solutions engineering leader at Nile, said his company is seeing strong demand across at least 14 distinct industries. He added that security has been a critical element in driving interest in campus NaaS.
“We already deliver significantly improved zero-trust capabilities through the segmentation of users and devices, as well as the elimination of VLANs,” Lakhani said. “However, in the very near term, you can expect to see a new service offering paired with leading technology partnerships that will deliver world-class zero-trust security to any size enterprise without needing a complex set of solutions or spending staff time managing that complexity.”
Meter is also growing rapidly. Sean Rose, who leads product at Meter, said his company’s customers range from growing startups with lean networking teams to the largest businesses in the world with stringent security compliance requirements and large networking teams.
Rose highlighted two particular innovations from Meter that he hopes will further drive adoption. Command is a generative UI that enables IT and networking teams to query their network, take action, and actually create custom software and dashboards. Cellular is the company’s cell service that’s deployed as easily as Wi-Fi.
“It’s our hope that with Meter, teams are able to focus less on day-to-day mundane tasks, and more on high-leverage work that truly has an impact on their organization,” Rose said.
Read more about NaaS
- NaaS buyer’s guide: Who is selling network as a service and what do you get?
- Can NaaS mitigate network skills gaps?
- MEF has a vision for NaaS: Easy provisioning and integrated security
- Alkira expands NaaS platform with ZTNA capabilities
- Verizon debuts NaaS cloud management for unified multicloud
Source:: Network World