2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria

For inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, vendors must have generally available services that support all the following capabilities

Service Capabilities: 

• Provide MNS to enterprises for networking products and related network services on a 24/7/365 basis for customer locations globally from an internally operated and maintained SDP.
• Offer a fixed monthly subscription fee for each device managed for enterprise customers for MNS for LAN, WAN and security offers.Provide MNS for network operations life cycle management of networking hardware/software in support of both LAN and WAN technologies, as defined by the MNS market definition.
• Internally operate a multitenant SDP for MNS customers using primarily internal employees. Provide services for customers’ existing LAN, WAN and security environments (e.g., “greenfield”/“brownfield” environments and managed takeover), in addition to transformed LAN, WAN and security customer environments, or otherwise adopting updated network and security networking technologies
• Confirm service management processes and tools for MNS achieve a minimum average of 80% FCR for all incidents, whether manual or automated. Proof of specific percentage attainment and all underlying method details are required to be demonstrated and provided to verify compliance for inclusion in this research. FCR is defined as all incidents resolved at the first contact of the MNS operations. The contact may be either human or nonhuman via incident automation resolution for the total FCR percentage. FCR percentages do not include any incidents resolved after first contact of any type, manual or automated.
• Confirm service management processes and tools for MNS (specifically for MNS for LAN, WAN and security only) achieve a minimum average of 25% first contact resolution for all incidents via automation only (with zero manual touch). This percentage does not include any first contact incident resolution that is touched by a human. Proof of specific percentage attainment and all underlying method details are required to be demonstrated and provided to verify compliance for inclusion in this research.
• Offer at least five of the following six categories of security products for MNS for security services, including:
  • SD-WAN (with or without embedded security functions)
  • Secure web gateway
  • Cloud access security broker
  • Network access control
  • Network firewalling (with or without IDS/IPS)
  • ZTNA
• Provide evidence of current and planned security incident automation methods, tools and performance KPIs that are tracked and reported, applicable specifically to MNS for security.

Business/Financial Performance 

• Have at least 1,000 MNS for LAN customer sites, at least 1,000 MNS for WAN customer sites and at least 500 MNS for security customer sites (under active MNS contracts). Specific site-level customer data (e.g, quantities of devices) is required to be included in this research in at least three of the following regions: North America, Europe, APAC, Middle East/Africa and Latin/South America. Evidence provided must include customer location quantities for MNS for each of LAN, WAN and security on a global basis.

• For purposes of this research, “sites” that are subcontracted to Asia/Pacific party MNS providers are not counted toward satisfying the inclusion criteria above.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on the quality and efficacy of their processes, systems, methods and procedures. These criteria enable MNS providers’ performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively affect revenue, retention and reputation in Gartner’s view of the market.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Completeness of Vision

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements. This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces, and how well they map to Gartner’s view of the market

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
A provider in the Leaders quadrant demonstrates the ability to fulfill a broad variety of customer requirements through the breadth of its MNS offerings. Leaders have the ability to shape the market and provide complete and differentiating services, as well as global service and support. Leaders maintain strong relationships with their channels and customers, and have limited obvious gaps in their portfolios.

Challengers
A vendor in the Challengers quadrant demonstrates sustained execution in the marketplace and will likely have clear and long-term viability in the market. However, Challengers are less likely to shape and transform the MNS market with differentiating functionality going forward.

Visionaries
A vendor in the Visionaries quadrant demonstrates the ability to add features to its MNS offerings to provide a unique and differentiated approach to the market. A Visionary will have innovated in one or more of the key areas of MNS (for example, service delivery quality, automation and customer experience). The ability to apply differentiating functionality across the MNS scope will affect its position.

Niche Players
A vendor in the Niche Players quadrant focuses on specific capabilities or concentrates its marketing on certain regions. It therefore may not provide broad functionality or wide geographic availability. Niche Players also may lack strong go-to-market capabilities that would enhance their reach or service capabilities in their MNS offerings.

Context

The MNS market is highly competitive. During the past 12 months, MNS providers seeking a competitive advantage have rapidly expanded their investments in automated processes and AI to improve network visibility and end-user experience. They also have applied AI and automation upgrades to speed incident detection and faster remediation of network outages or security breaches.

That said, offerings vary widely in service quality and the extent of support and monitoring. Providers that have implemented more process automation and AI into their service delivery platforms tend to have higher scores in key metrics, such as FCR and repair times, both of which are indicators of a better quality service provider.

This variability requires heads of I&O to choose their MNS partner carefully. To assist in that evaluation, this Magic Quadrant focuses on key features and support levels for MNS providers’ managed LAN, WAN and security service delivery to global enterprise customers. This includes choice of vendor partners, quality of service-level agreements and improvements in service delivery and customer support.

Market Overview

Market Remains Highly Diverse and Growth-Oriented

The MNS market remains highly competitive and diverse, including:

• Pure-play MNS providers
• Network service providers
• System integrators
• Network equipment providers

It also is a growth market, particularly for managed SD-WAN and managed security services, and is projected to grow by 7.0% and 9.4% yearly through 2029 (see Market Opportunity Map: Enterprise Network Services, Worldwide).

However, service features and capabilities vary dramatically, including service response times, the ability to monitor and manage underlay circuits and equipment, and the extent of security services monitoring. Providers also vary in their MNS bundling strategies. Some require MNS customers to buy other products and services such as hardware, software or network circuits. All providers in this research do not require these additional bundled purchases.

Gartner also has observed an increasing trend among MNS providers to outsource some elements of their service delivery to third-party support or technology vendors. Coordination between two organizations for service delivery tends to result in slower response times, but much depends on how providers manage these relationships and the extent of the outsourced support.

If, for example, a provider tightly integrates an AI security vendor’s authentication control technology into its service delivery platform, it may strengthen overall security access control functions with little resulting service delivery delay. In contrast, if a provider outsources a large portion of its network operations center support to a third party, it can lead to miscommunications and delays in incident response. For this reason, Gartner recommends that heads of I&O require prospective MNS providers to reveal the extent of third-party involvement in service delivery.

MNS Players’ AI Use Deepens, Evolves Toward Agentic AI

During the past several years, MNS providers have been transitioning from manual to automated network processes to make their service delivery platforms more responsive and efficient. This has laid the necessary groundwork allowing them to move to AI for IT operations (AIOps), which relies heavily on automation. AIOps is now widely used among major MNS players to analyze network telemetry and events more quickly than humans, allowing them to provide customers with greater visibility into their networks. AI also supports faster detection and resolution of network outages and security issues.

Further, MNS providers are now deploying network AI assistants, an extension of AI technology that allows humans to interact with AI-powered network management systems via natural-language chat conversations. And in the past year, MNS providers have begun to adopt agentic AI, an evolutionary step from network AI assistants.

Unlike network AI assistants that provide support at the direction of human engineers, AI agents are goal-oriented, acting autonomously to complete network tasks with little or no human oversight. In the past year, MNS providers have started to deploy AI agents primarily to perform network configuration tasks or oversee dynamic path selection, switching traffic to an alternative connection if a primary connection falls below certain requirements for critical applications.

In time, we expect MNS providers will rely on AI agents to carry out a larger number of network tasks, leading to more automated networks. Still, this transition is in early stages. MNS providers’ level of AI agent adoption varies widely from pilot phase to full implementation. Moreover, the service benefits for end enterprise users are mixed. While providers claim AI agents as part of a larger AIOps operating strategy have significantly improved on-time activation, incident detection and network outage repair times, there is little evidence of this in their SLAs. These SLAs have changed little in the past few years.

And while AI and agentic AI can help MNS providers improve their service delivery, the technology itself poses an existential threat to managed services. Networking and security vendors also are building AI and agentic AI capabilities into their products, giving them greater network traffic analysis and troubleshooting capabilities. This opens the door for end enterprise customers to self-manage and monitor their networks, thereby lessening the demand for MNS (see Why Agentic NetOps Will Move Enterprises Away From Managed Network Services).

Gartner has seen continued client interest in MNS services during the past year, particularly in the multicloud enterprise segment, where IT staff is limited and has a greater need for MNS support. There also is continued interest in co-managed services, where the enterprise retains certain management responsibilities, such as security policy control and network device configuration. Moreover, these customers now have access to expanding AI and agentic AI management capabilities built into network equipment vendors and SaaS providers’ offerings to help them co-manage their networks alongside an MNS partner.

Security Drives MNS Service Growth

MNS providers’ managed LAN and WAN services are relatively stable, with improvements mostly focused on AI monitoring and management features. In contrast, managed security services are rapidly expanding, with added SASE vendor options and protections such as threat hunting, XDR and cloud security.

MNS providers’ managed security investment strategy focuses on expanding AI and now agentic AI integrations to improve traffic monitoring and security incident detection. Some MNS providers also are integrating NOC and SOC operations as the security and network interconnection deepens. For the end enterprise, this offers greater choice and depth of managed security products and potentially fewer successful cyberattacks that result in damaged operations and revenue loss.

A handful of forward-looking MNS providers also have added features such as PQC protection. This offers protection from the threat that hackers, armed with quantum computers, will break basic network encryption and steal sensitive user/customer identity information or intellectual property.

However, as with other managed services, providers are at varying stages of managed security service evolution. Capabilities vary, so Gartner recommends using competitive RFPs that require providers to spell out their managed security capabilities. Also, Gartner recommends that enterprises ask prospective managed security providers about their service roadmaps for AI and PQC security.

NaaS and Consumption-Based Pricing Offers Proliferate

During the past year, MNS providers have ramped up marketing for network-as-a-service (NaaS) options, often promoting them more heavily than traditional fixed-price service delivery options. Gartner defines NaaS as a standardized, highly automated delivery model that supports dynamic scaling of network resources and is primarily owned and operated by the provider. Pricing is either consumption-based or as a subscription based on usage metrics.

How providers define NaaS varies. Most providers in this research have launched a NaaS option, but they range from design, installation, leased hardware and monitoring service for a single fixed monthly price to packages that allow customers to add or drop services or adjust service levels via their customer portal.

While NaaS offerings are often marketed as a more convenient and economical option, heads of I&O should proceed with caution. Such offerings frequently lack billing transparency, include excessive equipment lease prices and limit customers’ ability to reduce service levels. In addition, NaaS offerings that include consumption-based billing lack price predictability, making them unpopular with company chief financial officers.

Therefore, Gartner recommends that enterprises require MNS providers to provide NaaS service proposals with clear pricing of all service elements. This will allow heads of I&O to accurately calculate the long-term costs and compare that to standard service pricing models with purchased and installed equipment and monthly fees only for ongoing monitoring and maintenance support.

Evidence

Gartner analysts conducted over more than 1,100 client inquiries on the topics of managed network operations and MNS for LAN and WAN between 30 November 2024 and 30 November 2025.

In 2026, all providers included in this research responded to an extensive questionnaire regarding their current/future MNS offerings, and provided multiple offer, proposal, market penetration and services artifacts.

We reviewed all available vendor end-customer Peer Insights for quality purposes but not inclusion in this research. All providers in this research had the opportunity to encourage customer peer reviews. These end-customer insights (Peer Insights) can be found on the Gartner client portal by market name and provider name across numerous covered markets.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision Market

Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.