OFC 2018 Theme: 400 Gbps

Aruba Atmosphere 2021 – “Journey to the Edge”

4/13/2021

Each year, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company has its Atmosphere conference. This year the conference theme was “Journey to the Edge.” However, this year was also much different from previous conferences because Aruba completed the acquisition of Silver Peak last September. As a result of the acquisition, the conference had a significant focus on SD-WAN, the primary product of Silver Peak, and integration with Aruba. A critical new trend that the combined company is now pivoting towards is SASE, which Aruba includes in “Edge to Cloud Security.” Aruba is partnering with well-known companies to deliver a complete “Edge to Cloud Security” portfolio. Aruba’s broadening portfolio allows it to “land and expand” to customers and provide a more comprehensive portfolio. Portfolio growth is what other competitors to Aruba are doing because there’s a growing need to manage networking and security systems simultaneously as users and computing leave the campus environment. Additionally, the company made several new announcements to advance Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), like Aruba Central being available on-prem, ClearPass Policy Manager integration with the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, and IDS/IPS/UTM capabilities. The company also updated its partners on its growing AIOps capabilities and hinted that it would be making Wi-Fi 6E announcements “soon.”

New announcements

Aruba Central On-Premises. Aruba Central for customers that need an on-prem solution. This will complement AirWave, and the two will come together to service network management . Central includes deep analytics, peer comparisons, and AIOps. Aruba Central on-prem is a new introduction that sees acceptance by customers who want to manage the system themselves. For instance, Northwestern University, which uses 7,000 Aruba Access Points, is now using Aruba Central On-Premises.
Edge-to-Cloud Security. This includes a number of integrations for Aruba ESP. Among them are the integration of ClearPass into EdgeConnect, which brings in the zero trust dynamic segmentation; the integration of Aruba Threat Defense with the EdgeConnect platform; and a new service orchestration capability, so customers can have the freedom to deploy best-of-breed, cloud-delivered SASE security components.
Zero Trust Dynamic Segmentation. Aruba’s Zero trust dynamic segmentation capability makes it so users and devices only connect to intended resources. For instance, Point of Sale systems only talk to transaction processing systems. By integrating with the Aruba-based product called ClearPass, the company will offer end-to-end zero-trust dynamic segmentation.
Unified Branch Security. Aruba’s IDS/IPS/UTM capability goes to beta April/May 2021, with General Availability expected by the end of 2021. Aruba will incorporate IDS/IPS/UT into Aruba Central.

Future announcements. Management hinted at some announcements that will come in the future. These include:

Wi-Fi 6E Access Points. There were no announcements at the conference, but Keerti Melkote, Founder, President and General Manager of Aruba, said such an announcement will come “soon.”

Updates. We felt some noteworthy comments came up during the show.

AIOps. Aruba has offered AI-enabled systems in Aruba Central for the past year or more, and it is a core attribute of Aruba ESP. The company explained that it sees three general types of AI happening on its systems and also discussed the improvements that some users see from AIOps use:
- Reactive AIOps – most common (when a customer has a problem, the system help to resolve it)
- Proactive AIOps – We’ve seen it improve capacity 100% in specific retail customers, 4x speed increases at some higher-ed customers, and 30x reduction in user issues at some enterprise users
- Protective AIOps (Security) – 75% report IoT blind spots
Aruba Central. The company shared that it has approximately 80,000 Aruba Central customers as of 4Q20, about 50% greater than the just over 50,000 level in 4Q19. And Aruba Central now manages 1.3M network devices and over 10M end devices.
Aruba has delivered products to customers “on-time” 99.3% of the time, despite industry-wide supply chain challenges.
RAP and VIA. Both the Remote Access Point (RAP) series and the VIA software client have been available in both the Aruba and Silver Peak portfolios for a while; there was some discussion about how these can be used to manage and secure work from home (WFH) environments. We found it interesting that Aruba can turn a home into an office and felt that Aruba could have done more to emphasize this, as the product has been very popular due to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, so we are bringing it up because work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid work schedules are probably not going away soon.

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650 Group Take: Juniper’s Announced AcQuisition of Apstra - A Move to Software, Day 2 Operations, Automation

12/16/2020

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On December 7th, Juniper’s announced its plan to acquire Apstra. The deal is expected to close in 1H'20.

Apstra, founded 2014, boasts numerous customer success stories in large enterprises, service providers, and even reaches into the mid-sized customer segment. Cutting down complexity by automating data center operations is an immediate challenge that many customers need to solve now. As such, our first thoughts quickly ran to Juniper Mist with even more data that could head into Marvis for AI and automation.

Digging deeper, we see Juniper benefiting from additional software in its portfolio. Apstra will help automate networks, saving time in Day 1 and Day 2 activities, and push Juniper towards automation at a faster pace. We see the two as complimentary at both a hardware (PTX, QFX) level and a software level (JUNOS, Contrail). Apstra has many advanced features needed by operations teams, and so the acquisition gives Juniper a leap in time to market for their customers.

Apstra already has strong hooks into SONiC, VMWare, and other software platforms and will benefit from Juniper’s larger channel and product portfolio. We also see the acquisition helping beyond the traditional enterprise data center market. Telco SPs, Cloud, and other large-scale customers can benefit from the current combination and deeper integration that can occur by owning the technology directly.

650 Group's end-user interviews indicate that automation and the day two activities associated with more application, multi-cloud, and more applications are significant concerns. Organizations aren’t given more people for the increasing amount of applications and devices on the network.

Contrail Enterprise Multicloud and Apstra AOS will significantly help improve these pain points today and automate operations to help improve the user experience and IT efficiencies.

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An Update: Juniper’s Mistification Almost Complete

9/24/2020

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We attended a well-organized and information-packed virtual conference hosted by Juniper Networks last week. While there were many themes (400G, telco cloud, AI, Mist), the one that really came through was how much the Mist acquisition has reinvigorated the Juniper organization. About a year ago, Juniper made its acquisition of the Wi-Fi startup. It is clear a year later that Juniper’s Enterprise strategy has been “Mistified.” We will share some Mist statistics from conference and our thoughts, as well.
Juniper shared some milestones that now characterize the Juniper Enterprise group:

4 of the Fortune 10 are Mist Wi-Fi customers
3 of the Fortune 10 are AI customers for wired as well as wireless
By 4Q20, Juniper will make its SD-WAN products assured by Mist AI, thereby completing the single-pane managed system that will include Wi-Fi, Ethernet Switches, Security and SD-WAN. In slightly over a year, the AI operations system (AIops) from Mist will support the Enterprise products that Juniper had in house prior to the merger.
Since January 2019 through last month, the Mist AI system has improved to the point where Marvis, the company’s Virtual Network Assistant, can resolve 80% of customer inquiries, compared to 20% in January 2019.

We asked the company what has worked well with the acquisition, including whether the deal structure may have contributed towards to its success. Juniper executives explained that there was nothing special about how the acquisition was structured beyond the normal incentives for the acquired team. What happened after the acquisition, though, is somewhat unique: in effect, the Enterprise group at Juniper was subject to a reverse merger with Mist, whereby the Mist management team now leads the group. Perhaps the fact that the Mist team is in charge of the show explains the rapid integration of the existing Juniper products into the Mist AI management system. Perhaps, also, the integration went well was because the Juniper products (switches, SD-WAN and Security) were designed to collect and easily share telemetry data for use by the Mist AI system.

Juniper also featured a customer – whose name we cannot share – that is a major fast food chain across the US. It currently has 10,000 Wi-Fi Access Points with another vendor and recently made the decision to replace them with Mist Wi-Fi 6 APs by the end of 2022. We found it interesting how important support is for IoT and the increased importance of outdoor Wi-Fi during the pandemic. The company is deploying four indoor APs and three outdoor APs per restaurant. The customer spokesperson shared that Mist does AI-based, dynamic radio resource management (RRM) very well and he shared numerous screenshots showing power levels that were kept around 11-13 dBm instead of values he recalls seeing closer to 20 on the existing infrastructure. At this point, the customer has installed Mist APs in over 50 restaurants and he says he has not had a single Wi-Fi-related trouble ticket from these locations. He is also looking to implement location services in the future with the company’s vBLE technology.

The company’s cloud-based location analytics capability is designed to serve as a contact tracing and crowd management system to allow Juniper WLAN customers to reduce risks as employees and visitors go to the campus environment. The company introduced this contact tracing capability in May 2020. The company said its cloud-based contact tracing service is something that can operate on top of Juniper infrastructure, as well as its competitors. The company shared details about a large elite US university that is using the service and decided to upgrade to Juniper WLAN infrastructure as well.

Our view is that Juniper is well-positioned in the Enterprise market because by year-end it will have an AI-driven, single-pane operations system that covers Wi-Fi, Ethernet Switching, Security and SD-WAN. This is an enviable position because increasingly customers are making purchasing decisions for various equipment at the same time, and they are looking to reduce ongoing operational costs. By managing a system with a single-pane, customers can correlate customer experience, application responses and network issues in an integrated system, and pinpoint corrective action. This is not to say that Juniper has an exclusive on single-pane managed systems covering all these network systems – Cisco, Fortinet and others lay claim in the same. Juniper is in good company.

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650 Group Blog

Aruba Atmosphere 2021 – “Journey to the Edge”

650 Group Take: Juniper’s Announced AcQuisition of Apstra - A Move to Software, Day 2 Operations, Automation

An Update: Juniper’s Mistification Almost Complete

CHRIS DePUY
&
Alan weckel

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650 Group Blog

Aruba Atmosphere 2021 – “Journey to the Edge”

650 Group Take: Juniper’s Announced AcQuisition of Apstra - A Move to Software, Day 2 Operations, Automation

An Update: Juniper’s Mistification Almost Complete

CHRIS DePUY&Alan weckel

Archives

Categories

CHRIS DePUY
&
Alan weckel