CMC Networks this week added Juniper Networks’ SD-WAN and Mist platforms to its managed services portfolio.

The partnership builds on the South African service provider’s existing relationship with SD-WAN vendor 128 Technologies, which Juniper acquired for $450 million late last year.

At the heart of the offering is Juniper's Session Smart Router, which functions as a software router capable of running on bare metal or in a virtual machine. And, by combining the control and data planes, Juniper claims the platform can provide rich policy management and enhanced visibility across the IP routing stack.

While every SD-WAN vendor promises improved network performance and reliability, few SD-WAN vendors can deliver the level of visibility and intelligence afforded by Juniper’s SD-WAN and Mist AI platforms, CMC CTO Geoff Dornan said in a statement.

CMC began deploying the SD-WAN platform in 2018 in partnership with 128 Technologies. This week the company announced an expanded relationship that takes advantage of Juniper’s expansive routing portfolio. This includes standardizing on the vendor's service and topology exchange protocol (STEP) and secure vector routing (SVR) capability.

STEP minimizes delays to ensure consistent user experiences by routing traffic over the highest performing WAN link. In conjunction with SVR, the platform automatically reroutes traffic to avoid disruptions.

Finally, CMC now offers several of Juniper's Mist services including WAN Assurance and the Marvis virtual network assistant.

Announced in July 2020, WAN Assurance builds on artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities acquired from Mist to detect, contextualize, and remediate network disruptions. If, for example, a Zoom call were to drop, WAN assurance automatically investigates the source of the disruption and, in some cases, remediates the issue.

Additionally, Juniper’s Marvis virtual assistant comes alongside Mist’s WAN capabilities. Marvis takes Mist’s existing AI operations platform and makes it completely interactive. Rather than telling you the weather, playing some tunes, or turning on your lights like Amazon’s Alexa might, Marvis’s purpose is to help customers identify and address anomalies.

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim called the company’s recent acquisitions, which include 128 Technologies, Apstra, and Netrounds, key growth drivers during the company’s first quarter 2021 earnings call in April.

“We’re seeing good early interest in Apstra, 128 Technologies, and NetRounds, which are not only strengthening our position in several attractive end markets, but also enhancing the success of the broader Juniper portfolio,” he said at the time.

In the wake of the acquisitions, Juniper has moved aggressively to establish itself not only as a competent SD-WAN vendor but in the emerging secure access service edge (SASE) space. However, the company still has a ways to go before it can fully converge its networking and security portfolios.

Early this spring, the vendor took its first step into the SASE waters, with the launch of Juniper Security Director Cloud. The platform is a central management console for managing security policies, regardless of whether they’re for services running on-premises or in the cloud.

“We’re taking a very different approach than some of our competitors in the market when it comes to SASE,” said Kate Adam, Juniper’s senior director of security product marketing, in an earlier interview. “We’ve looked at SASE from an operational standpoint, understanding that this shift in architecture, this network transformation, is going to take at least 18 months.”