This blog was originally published to the 128 Technology website – in 2020, Juniper Networks acquired 128 Technology. Learn more about the acquisition here.
Red wine and chocolate really do seem to go together. After spending a few months with the executives leading the AI Enterprise Business Unit at Juniper Networks, I can honestly say that 128 Technology and Juniper Networks seem to really go well together. This is very good news for our customers, and our employees. This is an acquisition that is part of a bold innovative strategy that has great promise. I wanted to identify areas of promise for 128 Technology stakeholders.
Cloud Scale: Quite often a company’s biggest strength is paradoxically a weakness. The 128 Technology Conductor is a beautiful piece of technology with incredible amounts of data at one’s fingertips. It is clearly our greatest strength, highlighting the benefits of a software-based routing model. Finding a place to run the conductor software is always a challenge. Managing the ratios of Conductors to Routers presents additional challenges. And in our largest customers with many thousands of routers, the usefulness of the conductor is reduced due to the very large amounts of data and multiple instances of a conductor. Within the past 4 weeks, we have been shown a clear pathway to resolving all of these issues by leveraging Juniper’s Mist Cloud infrastructure. Our customers will benefit over time by having Cloud Scale for our centralized management plane.
Turning Data into Information: The Mist Juniper team leads the industry in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Mistification of the 128T routers have the promise to make networks of routers as easy to run as large numbers of Mist access points. We have already been introduced to several data scientists that truly understand how to turn information into business value. We have weekly meetings mining our resolved customer trouble tickets to learn how to predict, prevent, and resolve issues. Our hope is to reduce trouble tickets by as much as 80% over the next year or two.
Edge to Cloud: With Juniper EX Switches, SRX Firewalls, Mist Wireless Networks, and 128 Technology SD-WAN solutions, Juniper Networks can provide complete branch edge to cloud networking, with a single point of management and control from the Mist cloud. At least half of the customers 128 Technology have spoken with over the past few years have asked for wireless support, stateful application layer firewalls, or wired switch support. It seems that customers want ONE solution for their WAN network with one management plane. Juniper is delivering on this promise with their acquisition of 128 Technology.
Strength: Juniper is a networking giant. They were the first company to develop ASIC based fast forwarding routers, and have always valued engineering perfection. I’m so proud to be part of this organization. Many of the other SD-WAN networking players were acquired by companies that were not focused on networking. None of these companies has the breadth of product offerings to provide full branch to cloud networks. The 128 Technology stakeholders can take great joy in knowing that we were acquired by the worlds 2nd largest IP routing company. A company whose mission and purpose aligns perfectly with that of 128 Technology’s customers and employees.
Consistency: Juniper’s AI Enterprise leadership has made it clear that they want 128 Technology to continue to develop its product portfolio. We are not being assimilated, or sliced and diced into different piece parts. We are advancing the product without any delay. We have already been authorized to increase investment more that we would have been able to as an independent company. It is also clear that Juniper’s future investments will be tied to our success in promoting our vision for tunnel free session smart networking.
Wine and chocolate really do go well together.
