Juniper SD-WAN Demo Lets Customers Try Before They Buy

It seems SD-WAN vendors are finally getting wise to just how confusing the crowded market has become. Juniper Networks today announced a virtual tour of its Contrail SD-WAN platform designed to make it easier for customers to buy with confidence. It seems SD-WAN vendors are finally getting wise to just how confusing the crowded market has become. Juniper Networks today announced a virtual tour of its Contrail SD-WAN platform designed to make it easier for customers to buy with confidence. The idea behind the virtual tour is to allow customers to try out Juniper’s SD-WAN offering and see how it handles different scenarios before committing. The platform will allow users to test a live SD-WAN deployment, comprised of Juniper hub and spoke devices around the world, transmitting across a hybrid WAN. On the tour, enterprises can try out features and inspect service-level agreement performance, link switch-over events, and initiate security events. Users can also generate and view summary reports. Juniper’s virtual tour is also guided with features designed to coach potential customers through navigating the interface. The tour features an interactive demo that simulates deploying the cloud-managed service on Juniper’s SRX, vSRX or NFX SD-WAN gateways. The virtual tour will, however, require users to sign up for a 30-day trial of Juniper’s Contrail SD-WAN platform. SD-WAN managed service provider MNJ Technologies implemented a similar strategy in early 2019. However, instead of a virtual tour of one SD-WAN platform, the service provider created a demo lab where customers could trial up to seven of the leading products. Today’s announcement marked the end of a busy year for the networking giant. In April, Juniper launched a cloud-managed version of its SD-WAN service with the goal of simplifying adoption and operations. The launch leveraged the company’s $405 million acquisition of Mist Systems. Prior to the launch, Juniper peddled two varieties of its SD-WAN running on its Juno operating system: one built around its secure, SRX router and next-generation firewall; and the other based on NFX, the company’s universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) that can run virtual network functions on top of it. With the move to the cloud, Contrail added support for passive redundant hybrid WAN links; internet breakdown at the WAN edge CPE or centralized WAN hubs; and topologies such as hub and spoke, partial mesh, and dynamic full mesh. Juniper also jumped into the SD-branch market in early December 2019, extending the reach of its SD-WAN management console to include its SD-LAN service. In support of this goal, Juniper unveiled three new SD-branch appliances targeted at the enterprise space. The new capabilities mean users can now provision Juniper’s EX Series switches to managed LAN fabrics and configure LAN virtualization and security policies similar to how they control their SD-WAN environment. The newly enhanced portal can also be used to show Mist wireless access points and launch the Mist cloud product to provision and manage an enterprises’ WLAN deployment. Juniper’s busy year ended with the departure of Chief Technology Officer Bikash Koley, who will be replaced in early 2020 by Raj Yavatkar. Koley joined Juniper in 2017 after departing Google. Koley was seen by many as a coup for the networking vendor, which at the time was struggling with declining router and security business revenues and had struggled to sell its technology strategy. During his tenure at Juniper, Koley’s chief strategy was to “make the network simple” by leveraging automation and orchestration across multi-cloud environments. Yavatkar is currently serving as an IEEE fellow, heading up the development of network virtualization infrastructure and products for cloud networking. Like Koley, Yavatkar worked at Google prior to joining Juniper, and prior to that he held leadership roles at VMware and Intel.