Futurum’s Ron Westfall assesses why the Juniper Apstra Freeform offering is well positioned to unify experiences across vendors and automate essential data center workflows as well as ease multivendor data center automation and management builds.
Juniper Commits Automatically to Experience First Networking Strategy
Juniper’s debut of Paragon Automation demonstrates the ability to execute on its Experience-First Networking strategy. The formation of Paragon Automation indicates Juniper has the blueprint to bolster its portfolio through a well-executed acquisition strategy that most recently includes 128T and Apstra.
Futurum’s Ron Westfall views the formation of Juniper Paragon Automation as boding well for Juniper’s prospects in further assimilating its 128T assets to make deeper inroads into the AI-driven enterprise realm as well as successfully integrating its Apstra assets to alter the competitive dynamics within the automated cloud DC realm. Through Paragon Automation, Juniper is ready to win new mind share and move the needle across the automated WAN, AI-driven enterprise, and automated cloud DC market realms.
Juniper Reveals Data Center Intentions with Apstra Acquisition
Overall, Juniper made a smart choice in pulling the trigger on acquiring Apastra. Data center environments will require Apstra AOS-enabled IBN intelligence to handle the fast-emerging demands, such as compute-intensive AI/ML workloads, HPC clusters, and 5G-IoT builds, on their resources (e.g., DCIs, 400G upgrades). In the near future, however, the main portfolio development and marketing question for Juniper is “How soon is now” in orchestrating all of its recent acquisition pieces into a more cohesive, fully integrated data center networking proposition that challenges Cisco more broadly and directly.