In the win-win multi-cloud era, Juniper Networks helps enterprises achieve digital transformation

In July this year, Gartner released the 2019 Data Center Network Magic Quadrant. This report measures the service capabilities of enterprises from seven dimensions, including products or services, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, market response/record, marketing execution, customer experience and operations. The concept of the "Magic Quadrant" itself has become a weather vane for the development of the industry. In the leader quadrant, we saw a familiar name - Juniper Networks.

This is not the first time that Juniper Networks has been selected for the Magic Quadrant. In fact, it has been a frequent visitor to the Leaders Quadrant. In terms of solution capabilities, Juniper Networks has a broad product portfolio, including Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, an orchestration platform specifically designed for operations in the multi-cloud era, and a full range of enterprise data center switches, routers, and security solutions. By acquiring Mist Systems' AI-driven solutions, Juniper Networks has consolidated its technology commitment and achieved AI-driven enterprise IT operations from data centers to wireless access.

Recently, Juniper Networks also held the NXTWORK 2019 Summit in Qingdao, clarifying the theme of "change, innovation, sentiment, and future". With the digital transformation of the entire IT industry, change has become an unstoppable trend, and innovation has become the driving force of change. As for sentiment and the future, it just confirms the phrase Juniper Networks often mentions: "old friends, new faces".

Juniper Networks has always focused on building solutions in the fields of routers, cloud computing, SDN, etc., and has always been deeply involved in the Chinese market. It has made multi-dimensional strategic layouts in terms of team, service, and partner layout, and has formed close partnerships with many industry solution providers and ISVs. The six words "old friends, new faces" also represent Juniper Networks' determination to work together with its partners to jointly transform digital services.

"I would like to emphasize that Juniper Networks has been working with the new generation of cloud integrators to face new customer demands and transform together," said Ye Yong, general manager of Juniper Networks' Enterprise Division in China. In his view, Juniper Networks has been focusing on the implementation of the Chinese market for many years and has also gathered a large number of cloud integrators. However, with the tide of digital transformation, many customers' IT businesses are moving from the original, single private cloud to the future multi-cloud model, which requires cloud integrators to keep pace with the times and provide differentiated multi-cloud services to help achieve multi-cloud management.

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As a result, the cloud management platform has become a top priority. In the one and a half hour interview, Ye Yong mentioned the four words "cloud management platform" many times. In his opinion, this is the core competitiveness of enterprise cloudification. "For multi-cloud architecture, cloud management platform is becoming more and more important. These large cloud integrators have basically discovered the customer's attention to it during the service process, so they basically have a product portfolio of this cloud management platform. Everyone has a consensus on this point."

It is true. From the initial private cloud to the popular public cloud and then to the emerging multi-cloud, the most important thing for customers is not to keep up with the development of cloud computing, but to enable their business to run in the cloud and to promote business growth with the help of cloud computing. The cloud management platform plays a key role in this. On the one hand, an excellent cloud management platform can let customers know the current business operation status, which part of the business is running well and which part of the business needs to be improved, which should be directly displayed on the cloud management platform; on the other hand, customers need to further improve business processes based on the intelligent recommendation solutions provided by the cloud management platform combined with big data, so as to promote the healthy and orderly development of the business.

However, there are many cloud service providers, including Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, which are among the best cloud service providers in China, as well as companies that have transformed from traditional server companies such as Huawei Cloud and Inspur Cloud, and cloud service platforms provided by third parties such as Digital China and 21Vianet. So, in the face of so many solutions and differentiated service models, what are Juniper Networks' advantages?

Ye Yong is very optimistic about this, and his confidence comes from the controllability of Juniper Networks' cloud management platform - whether it is a public cloud platform or any other cloud platform, it cannot compare with the open source platform in terms of controllability. In fact, the more multi-cloud platforms there are, the more they hope to retain users through technical means, and one of them is to use the opacity of the code to create resistance to the customer's subsequent possible migration process.

Juniper Networks Cloud Management Platform does not have such a problem. Unlike common cloud management platforms in the industry, the code of Juniper Networks' multi-cloud solution is open. In other words, customers can clearly know how most of their applications are implemented. At the same time, for customers themselves or other service providers, this open source code can also reduce the difficulty of subsequent application development and achieve control over the operation team.

In the interview, Ye Yong specifically mentioned the TungstenFabric community developed by Juniper Networks. Currently, this community is under the jurisdiction of the Linux community, and many domestic customers are also using related open source solutions and services. "We also hope to contribute our own strength and put our code into the open source community. Openness is also a very obvious feature of multi-cloud architecture," added Li Jinxun, architect of the Innovation and Architecture Department of Juniper Networks China.

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Nowadays, more and more customers have realized the importance of hybrid cloud architecture, and multi-cloud management has become their first choice for IT management. To this end, Juniper Networks has also optimized the cloud management platform, which can achieve everything from the management of dozens of devices for small and medium-sized customers to the management of tens of thousands of devices on a large scale or even ultra-large scale. Of course, customers with strong technology and deep accumulation can choose to use open source platforms to build them themselves; but for more customers, purchasing Juniper Networks' CEM commercial version is also an ideal choice, at least they don't have to worry about service and maintenance.

In Ye Yong's view, choosing an open architecture has become a consensus of the entire industry. After all, no customer wants to be bound by one or several brands. But even so, due to the differences in the business starting points and application stages of different users, in the actual environment, Juniper Networks still needs to work with service providers and customers to jointly explore targeted solutions. In Ye Yong's words, "find a feasible and simple method that everyone has reached a consensus on, apply the efficient and controllable method, and implement it case by case."

Today, Juniper Networks has been implemented in many fields such as finance, manufacturing, and education. In fact, these industries seem different, but they have striking similarities in the application model of hybrid cloud architecture. "Campus network, branch office, data center, the education industry and the financial industry are not fundamentally different," Ye Yong emphasized. It is precisely because of the outstanding openness of Juniper Networks' cloud management platform that many 985 universities are considering adopting this solution. For universities, their strong scientific research and technical capabilities will also make better use of these open source platforms.

Since last year, the topic of digital transformation has gradually heated up. In fact, when we talk about this topic, we should pay more attention to customer needs, such as the demand for technological advancement, product stability and solution controllability. In terms of these three points, Juniper Networks provides customers with a good choice.

Currently, Juniper Networks has also started a tour in China, covering cities such as Chongqing, Nanjing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Its purpose is to widely disseminate multi-cloud management solutions, allow more solution providers to participate, and allow more customers to benefit from it, thereby accelerating the digital transformation process of Chinese companies.