128 Technologies will play a key role in the next phase of Juniper's artificial intelligence (AI)-driven WAN, said Sudheer Matta, VP of product management at Juniper Networks, during Thursday's AI for the enterprise virtual summit.

"How do you have more users, more devices, more applications, more bandwidth, and more support tickets be managed by a smaller team?" he asked. "You need AI."

Juniper did just that back in July when it extended its Mist AI and Marvis virtual assistant to the WAN with the launch of Mist WAN Assurance. The platform enabled customers to proactively identify and remediate issues across the wireless, LAN, and WAN networks. For example, if a customer was experiencing issues with a Zoom call, Mist's AI engine would be able to identify exactly where on the network the problem was originating, and in some cases resolve it.

According to Matta, the AI-driven WAN can tell "how is your application doing? How is your WAN heath doing? How is your WAN router doing?"

This, he argued, is critical to enabling smaller IT teams to manage drastically more complex networks.

However, WAN Assurance was just the beginning, and in October, Juniper announced the acquisition of SD-WAN vendor 128 Technology for $450 million.

128 Technology's Session Smart SD-WAN router was something of a departure from Juniper's own in-house, hardware-centric SD-WAN offering, said Dell'Oro VP Shin Umeda in an interview with SDxCentral.

The Session Smart routing platform functions as a software router capable of running on bare metal or in a virtual machine. And, by combining the control and data planes, the vendor claims the platform can provide rich policy management and enhanced visibility across the IP routing stack.

According to Matta, the decision came down to the granularity of visibility and policy enforcement enabled by 128 Technology's SD-WAN offering. He explained that Juniper's AI-driven WAN strategy is based on two principles. One, the platform has to be user centric, and two, the AI has to automate the WAN where possible and provide guidance everywhere else.

"128 Technology, with the Session Smart routing, gives us amazing granularity and doubles down of the picture of client to cloud," he said.

Matta argues that combined with Mist's AI, 128 Technology's improved visibility and the low-bandwidth overheads of the SD-WAN's tunnel-less, session-based overlay puts Juniper at a distinct advantage over rival vendors Cisco and Aruba.

"Can Cisco do this? Probably not with the Meraki solution, with the Viptela solution, with the Ion solution. They are severely disjointed," he said. "Can Aruba do this? Not with the legacy SD-WAN acquisition they made with Silver Peak."

In fact, Matta argues that no other vendor is in a position to integrate AI as deeply into the WAN as Juniper with Mist.