Juniper Networks Demonstrates Industry Leadership with Two MEF Proof of Concept Showcase Awards

Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, today announced its Juniper Paragon Automation™ solutions received top honors in the Q1 2021 MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept (PoC) Showcase. Juniper Paragon Active Assurance was recognized in two categories for its unique ability to help service providers deliver a superior quality of service experience, underscoring the market demand for modern automation solutions that embed active assurance to proactively identify and solve network problems before customers are impacted.

Juniper’s Orchestrated Multi-edge Clouds (PoC 131) solution received the Market Game Changer Award, which recognizes use cases with the largest potential impact on the service provider market. The solution demonstrates how communications service providers can accelerate adoption of enterprise multi-edge cloud services through the orchestration of IoT applications and connectivity on open edge compute platforms. In this PoC, in addition to Paragon Active Assurance, Juniper provided the SD-WAN, LAN (Access Points and EX switches) and Juniper Mist Cloud, boosting scale and agility through an API-centric, modern microservices cloud architecture while offering ground-breaking services, such as Juniper Mist Assurance (Wi-Fi, Wired and WAN) and Marvis, the virtual network assistant for proactive AIOps. 

The Spectrum Enterprise Revolutionizing Live Events PoC (PoC 132) was granted the Judge’s Choice Award, which recognizes the best presented PoC, both in the showcase itself and through digital presence. The solution demonstrates a differentiated viewing experience for live events, enabled over an optimized network slice, to deliver customized and immersive video content. It leverages the latest in video technology, edge compute-based AI and machine learnings, MEF-based network slicing and network-based quality of experience (Juniper Paragon Active Assurance) to both autonomously generate content and deliver personalized and unique video views over the enterprise network. Spectrum Enterprise, which partnered with Juniper, along with Adva and Equinix, led the winning PoC. 

Juniper Innovation Momentum Continues 

Released last month, Juniper Paragon Automation™ is a portfolio of cloud-native software applications that deliver closed-loop automation in the most demanding environments. Paragon solutions translate business intent into real-world performance across the lifecycle of a network and services, eliminating manual tasks and processes while empowering operations teams to work more quickly, efficiently and accurately across the network.

Juniper Paragon Automation™ builds on Juniper's existing capabilities in bringing assured service experience to service providers. Last year, Juniper acquired Netrounds, a programmable, software-based active test and monitoring platform suitable for fixed and mobile networks. Netrounds enhances Juniper’s automated WAN by automating the validation of end to end service quality expectations throughout the service life cycle. 

Supporting Quotes:

“This recognition is an important step toward realizing the promise of Experience-First Networking. With our Paragon Automation portfolio, Juniper Networks is on the front lines of helping service providers differentiate by delivering a superior service experience to their customers while also improving operations speed, accuracy and efficiency – now more important than ever with the increase in traffic, end-points and emerging services. ”

- Sally Bament, Vice President of Cloud and Service Provider Marketing at Juniper Networks

“The concepts presented in our PoC showcase present an exciting glimpse into the power of MEF-defined services, and business and operational automation. They give the industry an opportunity to visualize real-world MEF 3.0 Framework use cases that service providers, technology suppliers and enterprises are currently implementing, as well as the leading-edge concepts that accelerate digital transformation. This showcase demonstrated an outstanding level of collaboration and innovation.”

• Daniel Bar-Lev, VP Strategic Programs at MEF 

“By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at the stadium edge and combining it with MEF’s emerging working draft 84 on network slicing, along with Juniper Networks’ Paragon Active Assurance, the Spectrum Enterprise PoC shows how video content can be autonomously captured, produced and delivered for an immersive fan experience. Spectrum Enterprise is re-imagining the live event experience by delivering personalized, real-time content to fans wherever they are watching the game.”

• Satya Parimi, Group Vice President, Products, Spectrum Enterprise 

The MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept Program drives collaborative work within MEF, where members can partner to demonstrate use cases based on current and developing standards. This year’s PoCs demonstrated how MEF 3.0-based network slicing, 5G, LSO orchestration, SD-WAN, Active Service Assurance and SASE can be leveraged to transform user experiences. The showcase featured 18 companies joining forces in seven demonstrations over seven days. This year, the MEF 3.0 PoC Showcase Awards judging panel included analysts from Atlantic ACM, AvidThink, Dell’Oro Group, Omdia, TeleGeography and Vertical Systems Group.

Source: Juniper Networks media announcement