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.
