Juniper Networks subsidiary Mist Systems is ramping up its ability to provide enterprises with analytics capabilities. The company is launching a new offering, called Premium Analytics, that will give customers access to historical data that is up to a year old, and also tap into data from third-party systems.

These analytics will help enterprises improve their visibility into branch and retail offices, track usage and also compare Mist network data with other data from other providers.

Christian Gilby, director of product marketing at Mist, said that before Premium Analytics Mist customers could only access historical data that was up to 30 days old. He added that this new offering will be particularly helpful for IT managers who want to look at usage patterns on an enterprise's Wi-Fi network to determine how much is being used by guests versus corporate users. "This helps them predict what they need in terms of network bandwidth and provides longer insights into trends," he said.

The retail market is another area that will likely benefit from Mist's new capabilities. Gilby said that retailers might want to look at how shoppers are interacting with different brands or how traffic is flowing to different areas of the store. These analytics capabilities would help the retailer decide how to spend its marketing dollars or might help them shift displays around a store.

However, Gilby noted that while Mist is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven networking company, its Premium Analytics offering does not use the company's AI-engine – at least not yet. Mist plans to integrate its analytics system with AI in the future.

Mist Systems is the wireless LAN company that Juniper acquired for $405 million last year. Mist uses an AI-engine to make it easier for enterprises to set up and manage Wi-Fi platforms and also enforce certain network performance expectations. It also can detect anomalies in the network and microsegment traffic.

So far Juniper has extended the Mist platform to Juniper's assurance services so that the Mist platform covers not just wireless networks but also wired networks and brings together Juniper's switch telemetry data with Mist's AI-engine.

— Sue Marek, special to Light Reading. Follow her @suemarek.