Juniper Bets On the Enterprise With Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN

Juniper today released a cloud-delivered version of its SD-WAN service to simplify adoption and operations. It also leverages the recent $405 million acquisition of Mist Systems, which closed last week, to add visibility into both wired and wireless via its Contrail Service Orchestration platform. Previously, Juniper had two flavors of SD-WAN: one that was based on its underlying SRX platform, which is a secure router that also acts as a next-generation firewall; and one based on NFX as the underlying platform, which works as a universal CPE (uCPE) that can run NFV software, or virtual network functions (NFV) on top. Both flavors run its Junos operating systems to provide routing, switching, and security. According to Mike Bushong, Juniper’s vice president of enterprise and cloud marketing, the value that its SD-WAN offerings (including this most recent update) bring to the greater market is that they’re integrating its entire enterprise portfolio to help organizations transform and improve their networking.