Juniper Networks Ups the Ante on Multicloud Strategy

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In February, Juniper Networks announced an expanded portfolio for a secure multicloud computing strategy that spanned end to end. Today, the company upped the ante on its multicloud strategy with the introduction of an expanded Contrail Enterprise Multicloud solution, which now offers a common way of managing the overlay and underlay — orchestration, visibility and security.

Contrail Enterprise Multicloud is a cloud-grade solution that now offers new multidomain orchestration and visibility capabilities, with monitoring and management of any workload from a single command center. That’s a change from the common scenario of enterprises having to resort to two or more controllers to manage overlay, underlay and network devices, the company said.

Juniper Networks’ Mike Bushong

“A couple of months ago, we talked about the connectivity layers, or networking layer. Now, we’re taking that as the foundation and we’re adding the top to bottom,” Michael Bushong, vice president cloud and enterprise marketing at Juniper Networks, told us. “From a channel perspective, what we’re doing is going out with a strong story in multicloud and building onto it — a natural extension of what partners were doing before, allowing them to expand their offering around the Juniper multicloud proposition.”

Contrail Enterprise Multicloud can be used in public or private clouds, any workload – bare metal servers, physical networking devices, workloads that run in a virtual machine or container – and can run in any deployment, greenfield and brownfield. Multicloud will also be multi-vendor so it’s an open alternative.

The second portion of today’s announcement is about how partners do business, how they make money, and how they can become stickier with their customers.

“If we view the future as multicloud, then the problem is how to move companies from here to there versus moving packets from here to there,” said Bushong. “That migration path includes architecture, products, tooling, and most important, process and people.”

With that, Juniper put together a five-step multicloud migration framework to help enterprises realize a secure and automated multicloud. It’s a vendor-agnostic way of plotting a data-center migration or moving legacy data-center infrastructure to secure automated multicloud.

It’s a methods-driven approach to create a customized path to multicloud, regardless of where customers they find themselves in this journey. The framework considers the aspects of architecture, products, tools, processes and people and provides an approach for coordinating decisions across initiatives.

“The idea for partners is that they can participate in being part of the customer’s migration. And, because that migration is more than product – it’s part of the operations and business – it allows them to assume a consultative role within their client base,” said Bushong. “That means expanding services offerings to understand the business and ultimately to be a long-term player in the evolution of their customers.”

So, for example, staging a migration from solution A to solution B might be a professional-services engagement. Multicloud is also going to be automated, and is likely to pose a challenge to …

… businesses that don’t know what to automate, or lack the ability to automate.

“That’s where a partner could come in and do workflow identification or automation support — additional value-added services,” Bushong noted. 

Also included in today’s announcement are simple data-center solution bundles for new infrastructure designs, such as bundles that combine Juniper QFX Series Switches with Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, as well as professional services for implementation.

Juniper is also offering automation professional services to simplify data center redesign. The company’s professional services have introduced turnkey processes and tooling for network implementation and test automation. Automated Lab Testing offers pre-production test activities and provides customers access to a rich set of automation libraries, containing playbooks and test cases necessary to test before deployment. Automation Deployment enables IT teams to automate the configuration of their network.

Juniper’s custom software support service is also available for any software developed during a customer engagement.