Juniper Bridges WAN, LAN & WiFi for Cloud SD-WANJuniper Bridges WAN, LAN & WiFi for Cloud SD-WAN

Juniper launched its cloud-based SD-WAN service and, while it's catching up with competitors such as Cisco and VMware, Juniper says it can do a few tricks those other guys can't.

Juniper has had an SD-WAN proposition in the market for a couple of years but hasn't captured the kind of market share that has put the likes of VMware, Cisco, Aryaka and Silver Peak at the top of the leader board.

In an effort to gain greater traction with enterprise customers, Juniper has developed what it calls "SD-WAN as a Service," announced Monday, and is seeking to differentiate itself from its rivals with an extended checklist of technical capabilities.

Notably, Juniper says it scales higher, up to 10,000 sites. And Juniper SD-WAN unifies the wide-area network, local network -- through Juniper's own EX Series Ethernet switches -- and managed WiFi in a single control panel, Juniper Contrail Service Orchestration.

"SD-WAN is critical and transformative technology, but it is really just part of a broader movement toward revolutionizing IT operations," Michael Bushong, Juniper VP of enterprise technology, tells Light Reading. "The same principles that make SD-WAN so attractive should extend to the rest of the enterprise."

In addition to WAN and LAN, Juniper says its SD-WAN can also manage enterprise WiFi networks, through technology Juniper is gaining from the acquisition of Mist Networks for $405 million.

This broad range of capabilities is what gives Juniper an edge over its rivals, claims Bushong: Pure-play SD-WAN players like Silver Peak don't have switching and wireless assets; Cisco has difficulty unifying its separate business units within a single platform and its SD-WAN doesn't interoperate cleanly with its other platforms, he claims; and VMware lacks infrastructure -- it's a software-only service, he says.

"We can uniquely bring all the assets together under the Juniper umbrella," Bushong says.

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