Juniper to Detail Its SDN Strategy Today

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Juniper will lay out its SDN strategy via webcasts featuring CEO Kevin Johnson (News - Alert), CTO and founder Pradeep Sindhu, and EVP of Software Solutions Bob Muglia today. This comes about a month after Juniper quietly announced its plans to buy SDN outfit Contrail Systems.

Muglia in this brief blog on Dec. 12 gave notice that, “We’ve entered into an agreement to acquire Contrail Systems, a Santa Clara, California-based software networking startup founded in early 2012, and we anticipate closing before the end of the year. With this acquisition, Juniper gains SDN technology that augments our portfolio of products and services. As a strategic investor earlier this year, we recognized the inherent advantages of Contrail Systems’ architectural approach and we are excited to take this next step to acquire and combine Contrail Systems into our team.”

Early stage start-up Contrail, which got $10 million in funding from Khosla Ventures in July, was focused primarily on enterprise deployments of SDN. A Gigaom report last year said that Contrail had, “a few test customers and aims to make network virtualization as well as network-aware applications easier for enterprises to stomach. The company is pitching a distributed networking operating system as well as an orchestration layer that supports a variety of common protocols like XMPP and BGP. This means it will run on top of already deployed Cisco (News - Alert) and Juniper gear.”

Juniper enters into the SDN space at a time in which this space is heating up. Cisco in late November purchased SDN outfit Cariden. VMare bought Nicira. And Alcatel-Lucent has started an SDN business called Nuage.

Eve Griliches (News - Alert), vice president of optical research at ACG Research, says that SDN is one of the most interesting pivot points in networking since the Internet.

SDN is an architecture that separates the control and data planes of the network, but Griliches adds it’s really about much more than that. SDN is about looking at active flows in the network, understanding the requirements of those different flows, and using the network to provide those flows with the appropriate bandwidth and other network resources.

“It’s an entire paradigm shift here, and people are going to have to think very differently with SDN,” she says. “It’s not just the next greatest thing that’s bigger and better.”

To learn more about SDN, join me and Eve Griliches of ACG Research at the Software Defined Networking pre-conference workshop on Tuesday, Jan. 29. The SDN event will be part of TMC's ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami 2013 at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Edited by Brooke Neuman