Juniper Networks drives AI into SD-WAN with Mist

30 Jul Juniper Networks drives AI into SD-WAN with Mist

Juniper Networks has driven the reach of its Mist artificial intelligence networking capabilities into the WAN for better insights and automation. After buying wireless LAN vendor Mist early last year, Juniper has been integrating Mist’s AI capabilities across its LAN, WLAN and now WAN products and services to improve end-to-end optimization.RELATED: Juniper Networks buys wireless LAN vendor Mist for $405M
“When we acquired the company, it was a wireless LAN solution,” said Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim, during Tuesday’s second quarter earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “But when we combined with Mist, we really did it because the strategy was to take that cloud-delivered, AI-driven engine and extend it across our entire portfolio. We started to do that with our wired switching and now we are starting to incorporate our WAN transformation, our SD-WAN solution.”

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With more employees “working from anywhere” due the coronavirus pandemic, adding AI into SD-WAN gives IT teams more tools to troubleshoot WAN issues in remote offices.
Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle Research, said Juniper Networks doesn’t have a lot of traction in the SD-WAN space to date.
“Mist does have some cool AI technology and it’s a no brainer that they’re going to extend that across their enterprise portfolio,” Doyle said. “This will make life easier for network administrators who happen to have the Juniper equipment, but it doesn’t make the network self-driving.
“There are still a lot of manual things that will need to take place and there are very few networks that are all Juniper.”
Using the Mist AI engine in the cloud, the Juniper Mist WAN Assurance service streams key telemetry data from Juniper SRX devices to IT teams to enable customizable WAN service levels that can be used to optimize user experiences.
Juniper Networks also announced on Thursday that its providing access to a Marvis conversational interface as part of the Mist Virtual Network Assistant, which enables IT teams to use verbal commands instead of using the traditional command-line interface responses.