Juniper Networks is looking for a new path forward as it restructures in a bid to find more solid footing.

The networking vendor announced a significant restructuring plan in a Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 5th. The plan aims to "reallocate resources to efficiently support its strategic priorities" and is expected to cost approximately $59 million.

The most significant aspect of the plan is a major reduction in Juniper's global workforce with the layoffs of approximately 440 people.

"The Plan is the result of a thorough review of the Company’s business objectives, and is intended to focus on realigning resources and investments in long-term growth opportunities,” the 8-K filing states. "The Company believes the Plan will further allow it to continue to prudently manage operating expenses in order to deliver improved operating margin."

According to Forrester analyst Andre Kindness, Juniper's restructuring and organizational changes are just a sign of the times. He noted that other networking companies, such as Cisco Systems, have started a similar journey.

Kindness told SDxCentral that Juniper needs to adjust for a number of reasons that could potentially help the networking vendor to improve. One of the things that Kindness thinks Juniper and other networking vendors like it needs to do is to shift resources away from hardware-based research and development (R&D) toward software.

"Tech management technologies, including networking, are moving to software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based options as customers demand more pay-per-use models," he said. "Customers are also asking for AI [artificial intelligence] capabilities to help solve issues quicker and find problems before they arise."

Both SaaS and AI require a significant amount of resources to build new management and monitoring systems that sit in the cloud. That said, he noted that management solutions have often been an afterthought for traditional hardware companies that once differentiated on hardware speeds and feeds.

Kindness also sees a need for networking vendors like Juniper to meet the growing demands of vertical market requirements.

"While traditional wired and wireless connections continue to grow, the real growth in ports centers on internet of things (IoT)," he said. "The connections and types of connections of those devices depends heavily on the type of industry."

For example, Kindness noted that latency, security and bandwidth demands of network and devices connected can vary dramatically between a manufacturing plant and hospital. Looking outside of the tech industry, it's a rare sight to find a company that can serve all markets. The tech companies are starting to realize this and will have to make some hard choices as vertical requirements become a bigger consideration in the solutions customers buy.

"In late 2015, Forrester introduced a new networking concept called business-optimized network (BON), an idea that networks needed to be designed for the type of business," Kindness said.

The other challenge that Juniper and networking vendors like it are facing now is the issue of a large product portfolio that could likely benefit from some simplification. Kindness noted that a lot of the networking vendors have acquired a variety of hardware, management and monitoring companies over the last few years. In his view, companies need to blend together their existing solutions with the new ones.

"Customers are demanding simpler solutions with intuitive interfaces that control multiple subsystems and systems such as security and SD-WAN," Kindness said. "Forrester calls this zero-trust edge (ZTE), others refer to this as SASE [secure access service edge]. Ultimately, this means vendors will be eliminating products, organizations and personnel."