Juniper ties 128’s SD-WAN technology into Mist AI

Two months after completing the $450 million acquisition of startup 128 Technology, Juniper is revealing the results of combining its Mist AI and SRX secure branch gateway with 128's Session Smart SD-WAN technology.

128 set itself apart from other SD-WAN vendors with session-aware routing. Jeff Aaron, VP of enterprise marketing at Juniper Networks, recently told Light Reading that the goal of session-aware routing is to provide more visibility into individual user experiences versus other SD-WAN suppliers that use a tunnel approach.

Juniper says that by now bringing telemetry data from Session Smart Routers into the Mist AI engine, customers can better manage service levels across the WAN, and proactively detect anomalies to improve user experience. In addition, Juniper says its SRX Series of secure branch gateways can be onboarded and configured using Mist AI.

"Now with a single control point from Mist, we can guarantee the experience across the wireless network, wired network, and the WAN 128 Technologies network," says Manoj Leelanivas, EVP and Chief Product Officer for Juniper. "It's a true client to cloud assurance experience."

Leelanivas adds that customers can gather telemetry both from Juniper's equipment as well as from their competitors. "We work in a multi-vendor environment, such as a Cisco and [HPE] Aruba environment. We can get the telemetry from all of it and get a picture of the network and proactively fix it."

The Marvis virtual network assistant can also now troubleshoot Session Smart SD-WAN instances via natural language queries to fix issues proactively. "It has a conversational interface where it can do a self-diagnosis and also fix problems in the network," explains Leelanivas.

Juniper has also expanded its wired and wireless access points with a new cloud-native EX switching platform, powered by Mist AI. The new EX4400 secure access switch provides IT teams with the ability to create an Ethernet VPN - Virtual Extensible LAN (EVPN-VXLAN) network that stretches from the data center to campus locations and also has security features such as MACsec AES256.

Juniper recently announced net revenue of $1.22 billion for Q4, up 1% year-on-year. Light Reading's Ken Wieland reports, "At the mid-point of guidance for Q1 2021, Juniper expects a year-on-year net revenue increase of 6%. Of that guidance – $1.05 billion, plus or minus $50 million – Juniper notes that less than $10 million will be from the recent acquisitions of Apstra, 128 Technology and Netrounds."

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading