Juniper Networks has grown by offering products to its customers in the telecom market. However, it is undergoing a transformation and is slowly but surely becoming a side where large corporate companies and organizations can also go for a full network.
Juniper is originally known for its switches and routing products. In this segment, you will find products of this brand in well-known telecom providers, large companies and government, as well as well-known hyperscalers such as Amazon AWS and Google are customers.
Juniper’s office in Schiphol-Rijk.
Steven Blees of Juniper announced developments at the company earlier this week, saying that the company has achieved nearly equal sales across the three markets it has operated in so far—cloud, telecom and enterprise. That this is about to change is also evident in the numbers: the second market is now the largest segment.
reverse inheritance
In recent years, Juniper has acquired several companies, including Mist, the innovative Wi-Fi access point manufacturer, and 128 Technologies, the session-based routing specialist. Mist was co-founded by Bob Friday. This is the man behind Airespace, which was one of the first companies to bring Wi-Fi to market and was acquired by Cisco in 2005.
The AI technology behind Mist’s Wi-Fi products is increasingly found in Juniper.
According to Blees, you could call the acquisition of Mist a ‘reverse takeover’. The products of this company, like many other modern business Wi-Fi products, do not use hardware controllers, but are controlled from the cloud. Mist has extensive AI capabilities that allow administrators to keep an eye on everything and provide network performance and bug fixes. Although mist sauce is now ubiquitous, and the brand offers a variety of white-box options for its infrastructure products, the JunOS operating system remains central.
Mist’s ideas are increasingly permeating Jupiner’s products, meaning other equipment can be managed that way too. This is reflected in Juniper’s current philosophy. Where ‘self-driving networking’ used to be central, people are now talking about ‘networking experience first’. Blees: “Your network uptime can be great, but it won’t do any good if users have a crappy experience afterwards”
With Mist’s AI technology, the company manages to entice large customers. For example, American Walmart replaces 250,000 access points with these products, and Amazon uses them in its warehouses.
Juniper’s office in Schiphol-Rijk.
Focus on security
You can see that while up until a few years ago Juniper Networks was still just a manufacturer at the core of the network, it has grown into a company that can offer a total solution, in part due to the acquisition of Mist and 128. , from access point to security and everything in between.
The security side of Juniper is still a bit unclear.
You’ll find SRX firewalls in the security portfolio at Juniper, but it may not be the product the company is best known for. Although it can make smart combinations with Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), you can see from the image below that the solution offered by the company can be improved. It looks messy and is clearly in transition. Erik van Harten, Blees and Juniper security expert, says Juniper is focused on that and security is a key pioneer. It is clear that Mist’s ease of use, insight and smart management will also be a part of it. Could Juniper simplify this by making it more transparent or by making another purchase? Time will show us.
Source: Hardware Info
