Juniper has clearly gone on an acquisition tear. Just as they’ve completed their acquisition of SD-WAN technology leader 128 Technology, they’ve announced the purchase of Apstra, a data center intent-based operations automation and abstraction player. Given rival Cisco’s recent container-centric announcements, is Juniper simply trying to counterpunch, or does Juniper see 128 Technology’s contribution to Juniper’s branch-and-WAN strategy and Apstra’s contribution to an automated data center as a killer combination?
The price Juniper is paying for Apstra hasn’t come out, but financial experts tell me it’s well below $400 million, and thus lower than what Juniper paid for Mist and 128 Technology. In neither of those cases did Juniper buy for revenue; none of the companies would have been smart buys on that basis. Only one company in the group, Mist, had great market visibility, so the common element was technology. Juniper wanted, and wanted badly, some technology goodie their targets had. We know for Mist, it was AI support and automation. We know for 128 Technology, it was session awareness, and we know how the two tie in with each other. I think Apstra is another piece of the same story.
The network and the data center combine to create the experiences that empower workers, connect customers and the supply chain, and bind a complex organization into an efficient unit. Or, at least, they’re supposed to. The part about creating experiences is true, but the “complex” problems of growing IT dependence and infrastructure complexity are getting in the way of efficiency.
Juniper’s Mist AI concept, acquired with the acquisition of Mist and expanded since then, introduces a model for AI-based automation of experience delivery. The challenge is to understand what experiences you’re trying to support, and then being able to influence how the traffic and IT resources associated with them are handled. As I suggested in my blog yesterday (referenced above), 128 Technology is providing the answer to the first of those challenges, and I think Juniper intends that Apstra address the second.
Suppose that you knew everything about the way that all the critical IT applications of your enterprise were working, that you could identify problems and create solutions automatically, and support users inside the company or outside, directly. That’s the new story Juniper is promoting, I think. They want Mist AI to see all, control all, and do it based on the best possible foundation—an understanding of what workers, customers, and business partners are doing, and how valuable each of those experiences are to the company.
Apstra was one of the first vendors to recognize the value of intent models, something I’ve blogged about quite a bit. Their basic theory is simple; you can’t assure data center infrastructure and operations if you don’t know what it’s supposed to be doing. That’s the “intent” piece. If you do understand intent, you can then automate the process of fulfilling it. Apstra has a vendor-independent set of abstractions that let you assemble a data center from implementation-independent elements and make it work toward a specific, defined, business goal.
You can see how this would fit with the 128 Technology deal. Because of its session-aware handling of user traffic, 128T knows about the experiences, the user-to-application (and even application-to-application) relationships that combine to define corporate IT. Mist AI can (presumably; Juniper is still messaging its integrated positioning) support, monitor, and even assure these sessions through the company network. Add in Apstra, and you can extend that visibility, assurance, monitoring, and support throughout the total scope of the experience, from the application and data center out to the user.
Like the 128 Technology deal, this is way more important to Juniper than just the revenue from the acquired company’s own sales efforts. End-to-end experience management for business applications, and for public cloud components too, is a very powerful story to tell buyers. AI-based operations automation and user support is similarly powerful, and together they create something that could well be the smartest thing Juniper ever did.
The thing that makes this smart is the simplicity and clarity of the vision. Unlike Cisco’s container strategy, which admitted to multiple possible justifications and thus multiple possible paths to realization, there seems to be one single thing—experience control end to end—that’s driving Juniper. It’s always easier to make something work when there’s one very specific thing you’re trying to do, and it’s easier yet if your acquisitions tie into that single thing in the same way.
That raises the question of whether Juniper might incorporate the Apstra intent-model concept into its own AI-based framework, including 128 Technology. Intent modeling facilitates management and operations automation by not only setting specific usage-based goals, but also breaking complex structures up into smaller pieces that are more easily self-operationalized. They also abstract infrastructure, something that’s an explicit feature of Apstra’s approach, and that can facilitate control of multi-vendor networks. That, in turn, could make it easier for Juniper to penetrate the accounts owned by other vendors (say, Cisco).
The value of this to enterprise buyers is very clear, but there were some other tidbits in Juniper’s announcement that I think warrant some exploration and speculation. One is the Juniper reference to SONiC, and the other the focus of the announcement on T-Systems.
SONiC is a Microsoft-launched open-source operating system for white-box switching, and Juniper supports SONiC on its own switches, aiming in particular at cloud data centers and the public cloud or “hyperscaler” players. The decision to support SONiC was easy in a way; the big buyers demanded it, and it also demonstrates that data center switching is increasingly a part of the data center rather than the network.
Cisco and Juniper have both touted their “disaggregation”, more to respond to buyer pressure than because they really wanted to, or really had a strategic vision for it. Selling your naked switch/router hardware in competition with white-box vendors isn’t an attractive play for either, though it’s better than risking not getting a deal, or even getting kicked out of a data center, because you don’t support it. There’s been no indication either company had any strategic vision for the notion.
Till now, perhaps. Apstra could give Juniper an opportunity to pull white boxes into the Juniper ecosystem without abandoning or contaminating its own monolithic switch positioning. That would make the Mist AI story a piece of a strategy for countering the white-box movement, something every network equipment vendor really wants and needs to do.
The T-Systems focus illustrates that Apstra has actually done rather well with network operators, and in particular with operators who have started to climb the value chain in terms of services. There’s a strong managed service opportunity created by the 128 Technology acquisition, and managed network services make a pretty nice and obvious companion element to a software-service story. In fact, almost any higher-level service an operator decided to launch would do better if it had a managed service foundation, and of course had intent-modeled cloud data center infrastructure too.
Clarity of vision, to quote myself from an earlier point in this blog, is great. Clarity of vision coupled with timely execution is better. Combine both with elegance of positioning and it’s the greatest of all. Just yesterday I pointed out that Juniper still had to execute on a vision of a vertically integrated network based on Contrail, Juniper IP, and 128 Technology. Now they need to execute on Apstra too. Because there’s so much potential symbiosis here, that’s far from an impossible task, or even a hugely difficult one, but big router vendors in general, including Juniper, haven’t always been great at strategic positioning.
Opening up the SONiC story may be a particular complication. SONiC and Apstra really could open up a door for Juniper to enter into almost any data center, but can they do that, and address what they find? In particular, can they develop a positioning for those higher-level services that T-Systems seems to be coveting? Can they harmonize SONiC support with their own Junos? The fact that they highlighted SONiC in their press release suggests they don’t plan on abandoning it, and what one doesn’t abandon, one must live with, especially in a positioning sense.
This all combines to create a very interesting point. Two mutually supporting acquisitions could be a coincidence, but three is a strategy. While Cisco is apparently seeing future success lying totally above or outside the network, Juniper thinks that there’s still an opportunity to improve traditional connectivity, the baseline network service for operators and enterprises. They may also see an opportunity to leverage some of the tools associated with connection service modernization in rising up to a higher, application, level. If that’s the case, then Cisco might be abandoning the traditional network market to a newly invigorated rival.