Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim challenged Arista’s Cloud Vision to work on Cisco infrastructure and Cisco’s ACI to work on Arista switches during his keynote speech at Juniper’s Analyst, Influencer & Media Summit.

“It can’t be done,” he said, touting the vendor’s Apstra platform as “the only open management solution that is on the market today.”

Juniper acquired the intent-based networking vendor Apstra last year in a deal that drove deeper automation into Juniper’s Junos-based data center networking platform.

For cloud-ready data centers, Rahim claims customers care deeply about the management services’ openness. 

Apstra supports multi-vendor environments including Juniper, Cisco, Arista, and Dell, Mike Bushong, Juniper’s VP of cloud-ready data center, explained in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. 

Rahim and Bushong both noted that Juniper and its competitors are taking different paths forward. “Right now, there is a bit of a divergence that has arisen between us and our competitors,” Rahim said. “I'm not even sure that we agree on the problem to solve anymore.”

According to Bushong, Juniper aims to drive reliable operations across multi-domain data centers on-premises, in the cloud, or across multiple clouds. “In the operations space, this is where … what we’re doing is very different than what Cisco is doing, which is very different from what Arista is doing,” he said.

In his speech, Rahim also challenged Juniper’s competitors to “show a conversational assistant as smart as Marvis.” 

Juniper acquired Mist for $405 million in early 2019, which started out as a wireless LAN vendor and also built an artificial intelligence (AI) engine called Marvis. Mist’s AI functionality won Juniper over, and now Mist serves as the heart of Juniper’s AI-based enterprise strategy, with Marvis as its brain.

Juniper is “the only technology provider” that offers services built from the ground up with microservices in mind, Rahim said, adding that its platforms can scale for large organizations and can tap into data across a wide array of sources that “feeds literally from 150 users states every two seconds from every client on the network.”

“Harnessing data, learning from it, and turning it into great experiences for operators and end users. This is what really sets Juniper apart today,” he said.

During the event, Juniper added two new WiFi 6E access points (APs) to its Mist portfolio. The vendor also shared plans to tie Zebra Edge Insights into its Marvis AI assistant and the Mist cloud to optimize device roaming and voice-over-IP performance. 

Additionally, the vendor extended artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) capabilities to its Junos network operating system.

“Today we're announcing a major extension to our experience-first networking strategy, one that seriously enhances how we support all of our products by giving customers the option to connect any Juniper device to the cloud with a new offering that we call Support Insights,” Rahim said. “From proactively alerting IT teams about out of date software to identifying cert risks, the need for patches, upcoming contract renewals, the possibilities are truly endless.”