The strategic partnership between Ericsson and Juniper Networks was announced in September 2018 and in a short time has already paid off, covering the needs of 20 customers. The success has pushed the two companies to further expand their alliance, as told by Manoj Leelanivas, Chief Product Officer, Juniper Network : " By integrating portfolios and technologies, Juniper Networks and Ericsson continue their partnership to develop end-to-end solutions for 'era of 5G, solutions that will provide service providers with greater flexibility, performance, security and automation . "
Now the Northstar SDN controllers can be integrated with Ericsson 's Dynamic Orchestration technologies, allowing those who integrate them into the infrastructure to operate the WANO (Wide Area Network Orchestrator) as if it were a hierarchical SDN controller dedicated to the configuration of connectivity services . Translated into understandable terms also to non-engineers, the result is that you can easily and quickly create different network segments (Slices), each of which can be configured to ensure different performance, favoring for example the bandwidth instead of the latency or vice versa.
The extension of the partnership also guarantees security improvements for 5G networks as Juniper's solutions are now integrated with Ericsson's Radio Access Network (RAN) offerings, in particular with the new 5G High Level Layer vRAN that allows the virtualization of the RAN layer. Last but not least, Juniper PTX, MX and SRX solutions will now be integrated with Ericsson's Security Manager .
Juniper Networks and Ericsson ready for 5G
So it took only a few months to convince the market of the goodness of the integrated solutions derived from the partnership between the two giants, fundamental solutions for many operators who are in the complex phase of transition to the new 5G mobile networks. As told by Mikko Kannisto, Director of Transmission Networks, DNA "Finland is a singular market, where users use mobile boradband as the main connection service and therefore with a volume of traffic that grows at a rate of 33% per year. Strengthening our network to meet growing customer demand - and at the same time ensuring flexibility for switching to 5G - has always been a priority for DNA. Juniper and Ericsson have renewed our core network in order to make it able to manage the transport capacity guaranteed by the 5G ".