Juniper held its industry analyst day last week to present its strategy update to the market; the company wants to change networking for the cloud era. The company reiterated its commitment to three customer types: cloud provider, service provider, and enterprise. The company is making investments to take advantage of multiple technologies: 400 Gbps, 5G, Multi-cloud, segment routing across its portfolio for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 use cases; artificial intelligence (AI); and security. An underlying theme for Juniper’s enterprise strategy is its AI-focus that comes with its Mist acquisition, a WLAN company; the company is transferring this AI technology to its wireline products in the coming quarters. We cannot emphasize enough how big the opportunity is for Juniper in the enterprise market. The company has taken on a big task by extending the Mist AI engine to other parts of the portfolio, starting with the campus and branch switching and routing products, but we expect customers will see the value of automation and intelligence throughout the enterprise product line.
The company highlighted several key points of differentiation:
• A cloud-optimized, Linux based version of Junos is available for certain data center use cases
- Silicon photonics Aurrion optics will be available starting in the 400 Gbps optical era
- Contrail Networking is deployed widely (in ~50 Tier 1 and 2 service providers) for its automation and SD-WAN cloud-native capabilities
- The most recent in-house developed semiconductors supporting 400 Gbps: Triton (for PTX routers and QFX switches) & Penta (for MX routers)
- AI Artificial Intelligence including its Marvis system will be used to simplify operations, first for WLAN, and then it will be made available through its enterprise wired products
Enterprise. To emphasize its re-invigorated focus on enterprise, the company highlighted its recently closed acquisition of Mist Systems, an AI and WLAN vendor, which bolsters its enterprise product breadth. Now Juniper has a wide product portfolio: WLAN, switching, SD-WAN, routing, and security.
Service Provider. The company is showing good growth in its cloud-delivered SD-WAN offering. The company supports segment routing across its portfolio for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 use caseswhich it believes will allow it to serve 5G needs of operators. Contrail system Networking has been deployed widely to control and manage virtualized infrastructure EPC, IMS, and combined control plane systems at operators. Juniper continues to invest in high performance routing as evidenced by its strong position in the emerging 400Gbps market.
Cloud. Juniper expects that in the 400 Gbps era, it can take market share in Tier 1 hyperscaler switching because it has addressed some deficiencies it had not delivered in the 100 Gbps era. This includes support for SONIC, P4, Stratum, and other private APIs. It expects to ship the PTX 10008/16, with 14.4 Tbps per slot, by year-end 2019. Juniper is also disaggregating Junos to meet cloud operators’ flexible consumption models and cloud-optimized architectures.
Business Model. The company expects that by the year 2021, it will get 16% of its revenues from software. It revealed that recently, it was at 10%.