Juniper Networks has announced its intention to acquire 128 Technology, the company I’ve always said was the drop-dead leader in SD-WAN and virtual network technology. 128T will apparently be integrated with Juniper’s Mist AI at some point, and the combination of the technologies opens up a whole series of options for service creation and automation, not only for enterprises, but also for service providers and managed-service providers.
The press release from Juniper isn’t the best reference for the deal. In the release, they reference a blog entry that frames the combination of 128 Technology and Mist AI very effectively. The fusion has both Juniper-specific implications and industry implications, and at both the tactical and strategic levels. I want to focus mostly on the industry-strategic stuff here, with a nod here and there to the other dimensions.
We are in a virtual age. Enterprises run applications on virtual hosts and connect to them with virtual private networks. The cloud, arguably the most transformational thing about information technology in our time, is all about virtualization. I doubt if there are any enterprises today who believe virtualization is unimportant; certainly, none I’ve talked with hold that view. And yet….
….and yet we don’t seem to have a really good handle on what living in a virtual world really means. We run on stuff, connect with stuff, that’s not really there. How do we manage it? How do you “optimize” or “repair” something that’s simply your current realization of an abstraction? Could it be that until we understand the virtual world, everything we do with the cloud, the network, the data center, are like bikes on training wheels?
One of my old friends in IT admitted the other day that “virtualization gives me a headache.” It probably does that with a lot of people, both the older ones who now have risen to senior roles, and the newcomers who are inclined to see virtualization as sticking post-it notes on infrastructure than then trying to run on them. So here’s an interesting question: If humans have a problem coming to terms with the virtual world, why not give it over to AI?
When Juniper acquired Mist Systems, it seemed from the release that Juniper was doing it to get an AI-powered WiFi platform. Whether that would have been a good move is an open question, but Juniper evolved the Mist relationship to the “Mist AI” platform as a tool to create and optimize connectivity over all of Juniper’s platforms, in the LAN and WAN.
In order to do the stuff that Juniper/Mist promises, you need three things. First and foremost, because they focus so much on optimization, you need objectives. Otherwise, how do you know what’s “optimum?” The second thing you need are constraints, because the best answer may not be one of the choices. Finally, you need conditions, which represent the baseline from which you’re trying to achieve your objectives. AI is actually a potentially great way to digest these three things and come up with solutions.
Mist doesn’t describe their approach to the application of AI to broad network optimization, but I think it surely involves addressing these three things. Thus, the big question on the 128T deal, from Juniper’s side, is how the deal could help with Mist’s objectives. There are, I think, two ways.
The first thing 128T adds to Mist AI is session awareness. Those of you who have followed my coverage of 128 Technology know that this has always been, in my view, their secret sauce. Yes, they can eliminate tunnel overhead, but what makes them different is that they know about user-to-application relationships. The driver of enterprise IT and network investment is, and always has been, productivity enhancement. Workers can’t be made productive by an application, technology, or network service that doesn’t know what they’re doing. Except, perhaps, by accident, and accidental gains are a pretty lame story to take to a CFO. 128 Technology is based on recognizing session relationships, so it knows who’s trying to do what, and that knowledge is essential in any AI framework that wants to claim to “optimize”.
The second way 128 Technology adds to the Mist AI story is that knowing about something you can’t impact is an intellectual excursion, not a business strategy. Traditional networking, including traditional SD-WAN, is all about connecting sites. There are a lot of users in any given site, doing a lot of stuff, and much of it is more likely to be entertaining them or getting them dinner reservations than enhancing company sales and revenues. The relationships between workers and applications are what empower them (or entertain them), so you need to be able to control these to make them more productive. It’s not enough to know that a critical Zoom conference isn’t working because of bandwidth issues. You need to be able to fix it, and 128 Technology can prioritize application traffic and provide preferential routing for it, based on the specific application-to-user relationships.
Sum this up, then. Combining Mist AI and 128T’s session awareness can first extend Mist AI’s awareness of network relationships down to the user/application level, a level where productivity tuning is critical. Most companies would likely prioritize workers’ interactions with applications based on their importance to company revenue generation or unit value of labor. 128T can gather data at that level, and feed the AI vision of where-we-are relative to where-we-should be with the best and most relevant information. Once that information has been AI-digested, the results can be applied in such a way as to maximize network commitment to business benefits. What more can you ask?
Well, we could at least wonder where Juniper might take all of this. If we presume that Mist AI and 128 Technology combine to support those three requirements of optimization, we could ask whether it creates the effect of a higher, control-plane-like, element. Does AI and collected data combine to establish real understanding of the network below, understanding that could be molded into new services? Could session-awareness, the key attribute of 128 Technology’s product, be used to map data flows over arbitrary infrastructure? Since I’ve always said that 128 Technology was as much a virtual network solution, an application network solution, as an SD-WAN, could Juniper use it to augment Mist and create a Network-as-a-Service model?
Both Cisco and Juniper have unbundled their hardware and software, making it theoretically possible that they could offer hardware as a kind of “gray box” and software as a generalized routing engine. Could Mist AI and 128 Technology provide them a way of enhancing their value in this unbundled form, and accommodating white-box and even SDN within a Juniper-built network? Cisco has nothing comparable, which wouldn’t break hearts at Juniper. There’s a lot of potential here, but without details on both how Mist AI works and where Juniper plans to take 128 Technology, we can’t do more than guess whether it will be realized.
Ponder, though, the title of Juniper’s blog (referenced above): “The WAN is Now in Session.” Nice marketing, and perhaps an introduction to something far more.