On the heels of announcing a deal with NIKE, Juniper is saying today that its MetaFabric architecture has more than 5,000 customers, and it's adding features for security and analytics as well.

It all gives Juniper another reason to get MetaFabric into the headlines. Good thing nothing else is going on today.

MetaFabric — a catch-all term for Juniper's cloud data center products and architecture — was announced in October, but it hadn't been mentioned much in recent months. Juniper's been busy with things like adding a CEO and deleting some jobs.

On the security side, MetaFabric is going to work with the SRX Series Service Gateways — the company's combined security and switching system — to connect threat protection and firewall capabilities.

This enhancement involves Juniper's Spotlight Secure, a threat intelligence platform that tracks potential problems on an end-device basis. Spotlight Secure can aggregate feeds from other companies' tools as well, and Juniper is adding new feeds for geolocation data and for tracking attacks by command-and-control servers.

On the SRX side, Juniper is adding code to have the system enforce policy based on threat intelligence from all of Spotlight Secure's sources.

What this creates, Juniper says, is an open platform that can connect a variety of threat detection devices with a variety of firewalls — meaning it's not necessarily just Juniper's gear on both ends. Discovered threats can then be transformed directly into enforced policies. The two sides are connected by Junos Space Security Director management software.

MetaFabric's analytics addition, a product called the Cloud Analytics Engine, is more vague. Juniper is saying to day that it's adding end-to-end analytics that combine visibility into physical and virutal devices alike — and that's about all it's saying. Further details are to come later.

As for those 5,000 customers, Juniper is naming a handful today from a variety of industries. Other than NIKE, the company is citing UBS, Tribune Broadcasting, Cloud Dynamics, Catholic Health Systems, EVA Airways, Shutterstock, zulily, Interactive Data 7ticks, and InterCloud.

(Photo: That's a real photo of a Duke University metamaterial for wireless power transmission. This has nothing to do with Juniper, but dang, it looks cool.)