Juniper is making a move into mobile networking, announcing this week a partnership with Affirmed Networks, maker of a virtual evolved packet core (vEPC).

This isn’t Juniper’s first try at mobile networking. In 2009, just when Juniper was expected to announce a strategic partnership with Starent Networks, Cisco swiped Starent away for $2.9 billion.

Then Juniper built its own mobile packet core product line, MobileNext, but ended up killing it in 2013. Juniper said at the time that it was a strategic decision because MobileNext was hardware-based, and the vendor had decided that the future would be vEPCs.

Now that Juniper has shown an interest in Affirmed, will Cisco try a déjà vu move? Time will tell.

For its part, Affirmed has announced relationships with a few operators, most notably with AT&T as well as with Canada’s Telus.

The Juniper-Affirmed partnership will combine Affirmed’s vEPC with Juniper’s vSRX virtual firewall and Contrail cloud platform.

“We see our partnership as a leader in security and networking coming together with a leader in mobile,” says Angela Whiteford, Affirmed’s VP of marketing. “This is an open solution where security is a major issue.”

To ensure security from the radio access network (RAN) to the EPC and within the GiLAN environment, Juniper’s vSRX acts as both the security gateway for terminating IPsec tunnels from the RAN as well as the border gateway firewall securing traffic from the EPC to the Internet.

Juniper’s Contrail cloud orchestration enables mobile operators to dynamically provision and manage service chains within the EPC and GiLAN environment. It employs Contrail networking along with OpenStack to chain virtual network functions (VNFs) from Juniper, Affirmed, and third-parties.