Juniper Networks Inc. is focusing on helping customers move artificial intelligence in their networks from vision to reality, and today it laid out its plans at its AI-Native NOW customer event at the New York Stock Exchange. Over the last several years, Juniper has developed strong AI networking products, and interest in AI for networking is extremely high, as engineers need help keeping up with modern networks’ complexity.
There has been plenty of hype and ballyhoo around artificial intelligence and networking, but much of the vendor focus has been AI for networking, where AI is used to improve network operations. The other side of the AI coin is networking for AI, where a network must be designed and provisioned to support an AI implementation. Though many businesses will likely deploy AI in the cloud, making the supporting network the problem of the hyperscaler, 58% of respondents to a recent ZK Research/theCube Research study stated they have deployed or will be deploying AI in their own private data center.
After the closing bell sounded on Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story stating that Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. was nearing a deal to acquire Juniper Networks Inc. for $13 billion. When the story ran, Juniper’s market cap was roughly $10 billion, meaning the purchase price of $13 billion represents a 30% premium on where the stock was trading.
One of the major themes from last week’s RSA Security conference was the rise of converged network and security platforms as organizations look to consolidate the number of vendors they have and leverage the ubiquity of the network.
Many predicted that the cloud would be the death knell for data centers. The use of public cloud services would make data centers obsolete – but that never came true.
In fact, the data center has never been more important. The enterprise is going through a data center Renaissance, where everything is moving to some kind of data center – whether it’s in a centralized public cloud, private cloud or edge location.