The past year at Juniper has been exciting to say the least. Setting HPE’s intent to acquire Juniper aside for a moment (which is still on track to close by early 2025), we have been relentlessly innovating our AI-Native Networking Platform and consistently delivering on our go-to-market goals across our enterprise, service provider, and cloud segments.
I am so proud of everything we’ve accomplished at Juniper in 2024. Our campus and branch, data center, WAN routing, and security products have all proven time and again their ability to boost IT productivity and assure exceptional user and operator experiences for leading hospitals, hotels, schools, stores, campuses, factories and service providers.
So, I just want to take this opportunity to share a retrospective snapshot of how far we’ve come over the past year and give you a little sneak peek at additional innovations you can expect to see in 2025.
Simplifying campus and branch operations
IT teams are under more pressure than ever to keep up with today’s increasingly complex networks, and end-user expectations are at an all-time high. Juniper’s AIOps simplifies network management, empowering IT teams to shift from reactive to proactive management.
That proactive capability allows you to catch and fix problems before they ever impact network experiences, which means happier end users and up to 90% fewer trouble tickets. AI-Native insights and automation allow you to effectively free your IT team from wasting endless hours troubleshooting so they can focus their time on more strategic business initiatives.
Mist AI™ is the cornerstone of our AI for networking capabilities. We were the first to market with a conversational virtual network assistant (VNA) named Marvis. This VNA provides proactive recommendations and supports self-driving actions using natural language processing. Mist AI was also the first solution to offer the ability to clearly correlate activities from client to cloud. And this past year, we continued to raise the bar by enhancing our leading campus and branch solution with the following capabilities:
- Marvis® Minis, the industry’s first and only digital experience twins simulate user connections to identify issues across wireless, wired, and SD-WAN Minis can find and fix problems without end users being present on the network.
- Marvis Application Experience Insights proactively predicts call quality for Zoom and Microsoft® Teams, identifying potential issues before a user joins a call. These proactive capabilities enable teams to quickly resolve potential problems before they impact end users.
- New Marvis Actions enhance wireless and wired troubleshooting with features like Misconfigured Switch Port for identifying blackhole traffic, AP Loop Detection for reporting traffic loops, and Offline APs for identifying APs that are unreachable due to ISP outages.
- AI for Wi-Fi 7 takes wireless networking to the next level with faster speeds, lower latency, and greater reliability. It streamlines the transition to Wi-Fi 7 by leveraging AI-driven automation and insights, ensuring seamless performance for high-density environments while proactively addressing issues to deliver exceptional user experiences.
Extending the power of AI-Native to data centers
Over the past year, we’ve also introduced a suite of new data center capabilities designed to optimize performance, reduce operational costs, and simplify network management.
For example, we built on our Apstra™ automation software with new AI-Native Apstra Cloud Services. This suite of cloud-based applications enhances visibility and AI-Native insights for better application experiences and impact analysis. These applications nicely complement Marvis VNA for Data Center, which was launched to extend our award-winning VNA capabilities to our data center customers.
AI workloads have been an especially big focus for us this year. To lead in “networks for AI” and to help customers maximize their AI investments, we launched the Ops4AI Lab. This innovative lab empowers our team and our customers to test network performance and validate designs, as well as deliver new JVDs and features to optimize AI traffic over Ethernet fabrics. All of this is in addition to the fact that Juniper was first to market with 800G PTX routers and a QFX switch, driving unparalleled performance and scale into all data centers—regardless of workload.
These new capabilities enable Juniper to deliver data center networks that are the most flexible to design, easiest to manage, and fastest to deploy.
Setting new standards for wide-area networking
We also effectively redefined wide-area networking (WAN) to deliver unparalleled performance, reliability, and simplicity. Leveraging cutting-edge hardware and AI-powered capabilities, we enable leading organizations to build WANs that meet today’s challenges while preparing for the future. This year’s WAN innovations from Juniper include:
- 800G routers that deliver industry-leading scalability and efficiency, designed to support massive bandwidth demands and ensure exceptional performance for modern applications and high-density environments.
- Mist Routing Assurance to bring AIOps to the WAN, proactively identifying and resolving issues to ensure optimal performance and enabling IT teams to focus on strategic business initiatives.
- Marvis® Virtual Network Assistant for WAN, which simplifies WAN operations with conversational AI, providing intuitive troubleshooting and deep network visibility to help IT teams manage their networks with confidence and ease.
Strengthening network security
Siloed security and network management make defending against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks very challenging. To simply operations and strengthen security postures, we’ve introduced Secure AI-Native Edge, the first solution to unify AIOps, networking, and security under a single user interface (UI). The solution creates a compelling SASE solution, providing complete environment visibility and faster threat identification. Security embedded into the network delivers superior protection, improved performance, and exceptional operational agility.
We also continue to advance many of the innovative data center and telco security features launched prior to this year, including distributed architecture.
Accelerating time to value
Understanding the benefits of AI in networking and the value of the right network for AI is just the first step to realizing the full potential value of AI. Adopting new technology like AI can be a challenging, expensive, and time-consuming process. To remove common roadblocks, we’ve introduced the Blueprint for AI Native Acceleration—a customizable path for speeding up time to value and rapid ROI. With this Blueprint, we’re here to guide your journey to AI-Native Networking adoption every step of the way, providing advice and support to help you maximize your investment and remove obstacles in your path to success.
Looking ahead to 2025
At our recent AI-Native NOW: The Next Era virtual event (now available on-demand), industry thought leaders gave an inside look into 2025’s biggest networking trends and predictions. Our Juniper experts also shared overviews and demos for some of our latest innovations to the AI-Native Networking Platform. And of course, we’ll continue to build on our AI-Native Networking Platform in the new year, further evolving our role in helping shape the future of networking.
