Juniper claims first AI-native networking platform

In a move aimed at delivering “exceptional” user experiences and lower operational costs, Juniper Networks has unveiled the “industry’s first” artificial intelligence (AI)-native networking platform, purpose-built to take advantage of AI to assure the best end-to-end operator and end-user experiences.

Based on seven years’ of insights and data science development, Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform, is said to have been designed from the ground up to assure that every connection is reliable, measurable and secure for every device, user, application and asset.

The platform is designed to unify all campus, branch and data centre networking solutions with a common AI engine, said to be the only AI-Native VNA in the industry driven by Mist AI. The AI-native networking platform includes two new enhancements to Marvis, with proactive recommendations and self-driving operations, plus a conversation interface using generative AI (GenAI) for some use cases.

This enables end-to-end AI for IT Operations (AIOps) to be used for deep insight, automated troubleshooting and end-to-end networking assurance. The company said this will elevate IT teams’ focus from maintaining basic network connectivity to delivering exceptional and secure end-to-end experiences for students, staff, patients, guests, customers and employees.

“AI is the biggest technology inflection point since the internet itself, and its ongoing impact on networking cannot be understated. At Juniper, we have seen first-hand how our game changing AIOps has saved thousands of global enterprises significant time and money while delighting the end user with a superior experience,” said Juniper Networks chief executive officer Rami Rahim.

“Our AI-Native Networking Platform represents a bold new direction for Juniper and for our industry. By extending AIOps from the end user all the way to the application, and across every network domain in between, we are taking a big step toward making network outages, trouble tickets and application downtime things of the past.”

With the new capabilities, Juniper said users will get even more automation and insight. The Marvis Minis AI-Native Networking Digital Experience Twin uses Mist AI to proactively simulate user connections to instantly validate network configurations and find/detect problems without users being present.

Minis simulates end user/client/device/app traffic to learn the network configuration via unsupervised machine learning and to proactively highlight network issues. Data from Minis is continuously fed back into the Mist AI engine, providing an additional source of insight for the best AIOps responses.

Juniper is also introducing the AI-Native VNA for the datacentre, delivering insight throughout the datacentre lifecycle across any vendor’s hardware. For example, issues with datacentre cabling, configuration and connectivity from any vendor’s hardware are surfaced in the Marvis Actions UI with suggested proactive actions. A Marvis conversational interface (CI) is designed to allow IT teams to pose direct queries and get insight into the datacentre product documentation and knowledgebase using GenAI.

Juniper said that AI-native networking platform will provide the simplest and most assured Day 0/1/2+ operations, resulting in up to 85% lower operational expenditures than traditional solutions. It claimed that the platform demonstrates the elimination of up to 90% of network trouble tickets, 85% of IT onsite visits, and up to 50% reduction in network incident resolution times.