Juniper Networks Collaborates in New IBM Edge Ecosystem & IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem
Today, in order to help make the promise of the edge a reality, IBM launched its edge computing offerings in the 5G era to help both service providers and businesses. Juniper is excited to be one of the initial collaborators in these vibrant edge and telco cloud ecosystems and will contribute its expertise, innovation and industry-leading offerings in software-defined networking (SDN) and next generation virtual security. These capabilities augment IBM Cloud platforms including IBM Edge Application Manager and Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform by enabling the deployment of applications across multiple clouds, extending it to the edge.
The edge internet economy is forecasted to be worth over $4.1 trillion by 2030 and edge computing is the next frontier of digital transformation that will deliver real-time insights for businesses. The proliferation of big data coming from nearly everything, including sensors, devices, cameras and telemetry, enables a paradigm shift in business applications. These applications will use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to derive real-time insights directly from data. Such applications will process an insurmountable amount of data that needs to be translated into insights in real time to provide business value. To optimize for low latency and available bandwidth, processing is moving closer to and on to the edge.
This paradigm shift in the 5G era is driving new business and use cases, including Industry 4.0 applications, connected cars and smart cities. Edge devices drive demand for complete solutions that deliver intelligent responses to data. Juniper’s SDN offering (Contrail Solutions) and containerized virtual security offering (cSRX) are software-based solutions that are integrated and certified as part of the stack to bring higher degrees of automation, scalability and security-rich operations for our joint service provider and enterprise customers.
“The convergence of 5G and edge computing will spark a new level of innovation,” says Evaristus Mainsah, general manager, IBM Cloud Pak Ecosystem, “This in turn will enable and fuel a broad ecosystem of providers to co-create for a growing set of edge opportunities. We are excited about the value that our collaboration with Juniper can bring to our joint clients needing software defined networking to support their Edge analytics and applications.”
Regardless of the path taken, every service provider will need an edge and telco cloud and also support a seamless evolution from their existing operational model to one that embraces an NFV- and SDN-based infrastructure, which can be built with flexibility to support a variety of services with a much lower cost of delivery. 5G is the inflection point that will drive the investments required to fuel this transformation. Edge and telco clouds are about cloud principles applied to the telco network and its operation. With the variety of new services enabled by 5G in the coming years, service providers are in a prime position to seize new revenue by embracing the edge which is finally ready to deliver on years of promise.
Implementing edge and telco clouds that will power service provider transformation is complex. Many service providers realize that satisfying these requirements and delivering on the bigger promise of service provider transformation requires new expertise and tools.
Juniper is Uniquely Positioned to Accelerate Edge Transformation
To help simplify and accelerate service provider transformation to support a distributed telco cloud architecture, Juniper provides three offerings:
- Integrated Solution Offering – Juniper communicates a blueprint, with tested and documented reference architectures for common use cases.
- Fully-packaged Stack Offering – Customer purchases and deploys pre-packaged product and software.
- Telco Cloud Platform-as-a-Service Offering – Customer consumes the fully-packaged stack-as-a-service.
Juniper provides a complete solution built upon our Platform, Edge Services and Contrail Networking Portfolio in combination with solutions from our collaborators like IBM and Red Hat and is uniquely positioned to help service providers transform by:
- Offering a fully-packaged, tested and documented cloud stack, built upon best-of-breed components in order to accelerate time to market by reducing validation and integration.
- Being a “VNF neutral” vendor and offering a VNF inclusive horizontal cloud supporting a variety of use cases and deployment models while still optimized for VNFs.
- Leveraging open source to unlock the telco cloud stack and benefit from a dynamic ecosystem.
- Offering a pre-integrated edge platform that combines dynamic orchestration, automation, and scalable connectivity into a shrink-wrapped solution which allows service providers to deploy a stable, pre-tested telco cloud solution quickly and efficiently.
- Providing a security expertise that most of our edge and telco cloud competitors do not have. Security is embedded in the Juniper software stack.
With the promise of extremely high bandwidth and ultra-low latency capabilities, 5G and edge computing will enable many new and exciting revenue-generating applications. The good news for service providers is that they are in an excellent position to host these services by modernizing their highly-distributed infrastructures. Juniper and its best-in-breed partners are here to help support this network transformation.
Learn how to deliver applications at cloud scale at our Juniper Virtual Summit on June 10 (US/EMEA) and June 11 (APAC). Register here.
