Juniper Networks, a networking giant that has historically counted service providers as its biggest customer segment, has been making an enterprise push over the course of the last year. But then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which affected IT spending and changed networking needs dramatically and for the long-term.
Juniper on Thursday released its Q2 2020 financials and while revenue declined 1 percent year-over-year, which the vendor largely attributed to supply restraints related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Junipers software orders grew 7 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm attributed that growth to a combination of strong security and subscriptions to Mist Systems technology. Juniper acquired Mist Systems in August 2019 and the addition of the startups AI technology couldnt have come at a better time as enterprises grapple with an barrage of home workers and changing campus networking needs, Jeff Aaron, vice president of enterprise marketing for Juniper Networks, told CRN.
Juniper this week also introduced its new WAN Assurance Service and a virtual network assistant (VNA) conversational interface powered by Marvis, Mists VNA technology. The enhancements make up the fourth generation of Junipers AI-Driven Enterprise strategy, which revolves around automating and optimizing IT management across wired, wireless and the WAN, and enhancing end user satisfaction. Aaron talked about Junipers enterprise push and its latest offerings, Junipers approach to SD-WAN compared to the competition, and how the networking giants AI strategy will be key in helping enterprises address post-COVID-19 networking challenges.
Here are excerpts from the conversation.
How critical has the Mist acquisition been in helping enterprises adjust to new networking and IT requirements that came about due to COVID-19?
Last quarter, there was a reorganization at Juniper where we created what we called an AI-Driven Enterprise business unit with marketing, sales, products and engineering, led by Sujai Hajela, who was the CEO of Mist Systems. Under that business unit is now wired and wireless access, and WAN. You can see that the Mist part of the equation has become very core to Juniper's enterprise strategy. Campus, branch, and edge has now moved under the Mist umbrella. Juniper is basically putting its money where its mouth is and aligning all the product portfolios under that team to take that vision forward.
Nothing changes with the partner program. Weve been tightly aligning Mist partners with the Juniper partners and making it very easy for both to become partners of each vendor -- its basically a click that says; would you like to add Mist to your portfolio? The channel program for Mist has grown by a triple-digit percentage since combining the partner programs and weve been really excited about that.
Has the COVID-19 pandemic changed Juniper's networking strategy?
Weve been [talking about] our vision since the Mist acquisition last year. Weve always had planned to go from wireless, to wired, to security, WAN, to data center -- thats not new. But what is new is that we are seeing new COVID-19-led use cases. One is what we are calling the AI-Driven Enterprise at Home. The ability to say that we have low-cost [access points], for example, that are being announced soon, that can be shipped to your home. We can combine that with a firewall that weve offered for a while, and then youll get all this management so its easier to manage your employees at home.
The other area were seeing a strong uptick in is when people do go back to work, we have specific contact tracing [technology] we are selling and its doing really well. We just won a major university on the East coast that spent over $5 million to rip out their existing wireless to get the contact tracing. When people come back on campus, we have proximity tracing. If someone identifies themselves as someone who is COVID-positive or symptomatic, we can use our BLE technology to show everyone they came in contact with without having to use an app -- just based on BLE signals or a BLE badge. We can look on the floorplan to see where they spent their time to see where they should send a cleaning crew -- thats called journey-mapping. We can also do real-time congestion alerting. If there are too many people in a conference room, we can alert IT and facilities to send someone to do social distancing so you dont have to hire a boatload of security guards. Were getting really strong traction because our BLE solution is the only one in the industry that is integrated with our Wi-Fi that doesnt require battery-powered beacons.
How important is the addition of location services and the contact tracing feature to Juniper's enterprise portfolio?
Last week, we announced a partnership with ServiceNow. We can detect all the things I mentioned [with contact tracing], and we have an API with ServiceNow where they can flow that information into their system for case management. Once a case is entered, they can pull in all our user data for managers, HR, or facilities staff -- even the employees themselves. Thats two industry leaders coming together with two different contact tracing solutions based on what customers are asking for, weve automated integration.
As much as I hate to say it, despite campus spending being down and showing negative growth, in general, we are seeing strong demand for what we are doing. Mist had double-digit growth last quarter and part of that was due to contact tracing. The whole beauty of location services -- and contact tracing is one of them -- is that it takes an ecosystem. You need mapping software, apps, and a whole bunch of different things. Its up to our partners to put those together. From Day One, location services have always been very interesting to partners.
How does Juniper's SD-WAN approach differentiate in the crowded market that is seeing a lot of consolidation?
SD-WAN is still a very static and reactive model. You have to create a static policy on what you want to do and how applications should react, and to be honest, SD-WAN is not new, but the market is still only one-third penetrated. The reason is that its very complicated to deploy and its still very much focused on network and application policies. What we want to deliver is the AI-driven WAN that is true self-diving and adapts in real-time. Its focused on user experiences. Just because the link is up and passing traffic, doesnt mean youre having a good experience. That was always our philosophy in wireless -- Up is not the same as good. Weve now taken that same philosophy on the wireless and added it to the WAN.
We are focused on the user experience, combining WAN automation with wire, wireless, and security, and its all built on a modern cloud -- most SD-WAN solutions are 10-15 years old and are not -- and ours has true AI support with [Mists virtual network assistant technology] Marvis. Every trouble ticket is passed through our AI engine, so it learns and keeps getting better. No one in the industry is doing that for WAN. Aruba is cutting and pasting these things on their slides now that they bought Silver Peak, but its going to be years to come close to this and their AI doesnt have near the capabilities that ours has to do this.
How is Juniper's enterprise push progressing during the recent economic downturn that has impacted IT spending?
The key takeaway is the market itself for enterprise, campus, and branch has declined -- it has seen negative growth -- whereas our enterprise revenue increased along with campus and branch [revenue] last quarter. We also had a record quarter for Mist in terms of logos. In the midst of a pandemic, we are seeing record numbers, which benefits us as well as our partners. Its really due to the fact that now more than ever, people need cloud and AI because they cant get on-site. Now, theres more branch office sites and its tougher to troubleshoot when people are at home. Its all really driving more and more towards the Mist model, and for that weve been extremely fortunate.
Continue reading here:
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources [Last Updated On: November 8th, 2009] [Originally Added On: November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? [Last Updated On: April 25th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video [Last Updated On: April 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster [Last Updated On: May 4th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course [Last Updated On: May 5th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer [Last Updated On: May 5th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course [Last Updated On: May 7th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... [Last Updated On: May 10th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada [Last Updated On: May 10th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar [Last Updated On: May 10th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award [Last Updated On: May 13th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB [Last Updated On: May 16th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... [Last Updated On: May 16th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International [Last Updated On: May 16th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm [Last Updated On: May 23rd, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets [Last Updated On: May 23rd, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying [Last Updated On: May 23rd, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? [Last Updated On: May 25th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] [Last Updated On: May 25th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants [Last Updated On: May 27th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? [Last Updated On: May 28th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence [Last Updated On: May 29th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain [Last Updated On: May 29th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty [Last Updated On: May 30th, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App [Last Updated On: May 31st, 2012] [Originally Added On: May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google [Last Updated On: June 5th, 2012] [Originally Added On: June 5th, 2012]