Juniper Networks Expands AI-Native Routing Portfolio with AI-Native Automation and Extended Coverage

• 25 Feb 2025
• TM Team
• 0 Comments

Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-Native Networking, announced a new round of innovations for its routing portfolio that expedite deployment and enhance routing troubleshooting at scale. By leveraging Mist AI, Juniper’s industry-leading platform for AI-native operations, Juniper’s WAN routing solution has been enhanced with even more automation and insight for end-to-end routing observability and control. The new Juniper Networks^® ACX7020 Access Edge Router, also launched today, extends these automation capabilities all the way to the metro and customer premises. With Juniper’s enhanced AI-Native Routing portfolio, enterprises, cloud and service providers alike can unleash the potential of their WAN investments to deliver unparalleled performance and reliability and minimize carbon footprint, meeting the demands of the AI era.

The ongoing rapid increase in network traffic across both service provider and enterprise WANs, and the rise of new, unpredictable traffic patterns—such as Generative AI (GenAI) workloads—is intensifying the need for reliable, high-performance WAN connectivity and driving up operational complexity. Juniper’s expanded AI-Native Routing portfolio addresses this challenge with advanced automation that scales to the largest enterprises, cloud and service provider networks.

WAN Automation drives exceptional experiences at scale
The Juniper^® Paragon portfolio makes automating the WAN intuitively easy, from Day 0 to Day 2+. It reduces deployment times while ensuring that both network operations teams and end users have consistently amazing experiences. As a key solution within the Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform, Paragon has been enhanced with the following capabilities:

• AI-native routing observability: Mist AI now provides comprehensive visibility and control of end-to-end routing using AI Operations (AIOps). This helps to detect complex routing issues and anomalies and proactively recommend actions. By introducing new levels of insight and automation to network operators, Mist AI has been proven to reduce ongoing expenditures by up to 85 percent in some instances.
• Proactive troubleshooting with LLM Connector: In addition to leveraging Marvis^®, Juniper’s leading Virtual Network Assistant (VNA) driven by Mist AI, LLM Connector gives customers the option of leveraging their own LLM (large language model) deployments for advanced conversational interactions. This enables straightforward troubleshooting to accelerate resolution of even the most complex routing issues.
• Intent-based network optimization: Juniper now supports fully intent-driven traffic engineering policies that streamline and simplify routing optimization to meet the performance requirements of the applications that use the network. This builds on the established knowledge inherent to Juniper WAN solutions, created via decades of sophisticated deployments that involve many terabytes of traffic and thousands of optimizations each month.

Best-in-class routing platforms for performance and sustainability
Juniper's comprehensive portfolio of best-of-breed routers offer unparalleled capacity, agility and operational consistency with the end-to-end automation required for service-aware networks that power today’s hyperconnected world. The Juniper AI-Native Routing solution has been augmented with the following new capabilities:

• Reduced energy bills and consumption with a new energy-efficient automation use case: Juniperleverages port, port group and line card sleep features within its routing platforms to scan, identify and switch off any quantity of modules that are not required to support current traffic demand.*
• Extended WAN coverage into customer premises with the ACX7020 Access Edge Router: The ACX7020 is an I-Temp-rated access router deployable in both indoor and outdoor environments and features a compact form factor for installation in space-constrained locations. With this router, network operators can deliver exceptional performance by connecting endpoints directly to the WAN, with plug-and-play support for AI-Native Routing.

“Operators and enterprises urgently need to plan for future traffic complexity and control spiraling costs and complexity. With AI-Native Networking Juniper addresses both. By combining Juniper’s proven Mist AI experience with its strong Paragon WAN automation portfolio—and by integrating both with the Juniper routing and switching portfolio—Juniper addresses two of the most pressing industry challenges: 1) how to efficiently manage huge (often AI-driven) data flows across WANs and 2) how to gain both higher productivity and better WAN outcomes, simultaneously. With this announcement, Juniper is expanding its AI-Native Networking Platform into private and core/transport WANs to streamline their deployment, management and operation. With plug-&-play support for the new ACX7020 Edge Access Router, Juniper is giving customers the power and simplicity of AI-driven configuration of the complex enterprise/WAN edge – enabling support for a multitude of new services including AI traffic. For operators, AIOps and intent-based networking optimization across the WAN promises much lower costs and much higher user satisfaction, which is a significant win-win,” said,  Grant Lenahan, Partner & Principal Analyst, Appledore Research

 “Technical leaders of enterprise, cloud and service provider organizations alike face multi-faceted challenges to deliver the best possible business results from the WAN in the AI era. Reliability, performance and empowered users must be balanced against CapEx/OpEx and capacity pressures, operational complexity and sustainability goals. In response, Juniper is delivering the industry’s first converged, comprehensive AI-Native routing solution, taking another step toward the fully Self-Driving Network™. By leveraging a combination of innovation and advanced automation, we’re helping customers to quickly lower WAN running costs, enable out-of-the-box simplicity, achieve significant energy efficiency and drive exceptional experiences at scale,” said, AE Natarajan, Executive Vice President & Chief Development Officer, Juniper Networks.