Juniper has killed off its MobileNext platform only two years after its launch, having apparently failed to mount a convincing challenge to Cisco’s ASR 5000, based on its canny acquisition of Starent.
MobileNext was part of Juniper’s Project Falcon, an ambitious program to build a full platform optimized for multimedia delivery over mobile networks, to differentiate its MX edge routers. The product, unveiled at Mobile World Congress in 2011, allowed the MX 3D router to function as a broadband gateway; a policy manager for subscriber management systems; or a management control plane for 2G, 3G and LTE mobile packet cores.
The offering would have significantly enhanced Juniper’s packet core platform and gone head-on with the ASR 5000 LTE gateway, but according to NetworkWorld, sales were low and lengthy evaluation cycles were straining Juniper’s finances without delivering the required results.
The vendor will liquidate all three MobileNext products, implemented in software on the MX 3D routers. These are the MobileNext Broadband Gateway, which can work with 3G, or as an LTE packet gateway; the MobileNext Policy Manager, which handles LTE’s PCRF functions and an element which does not run on the router, the MobileNext Control Gateway, which handles the mobile core’s signaling plane. Juniper also resold Bridgewater’s control plane portfolio as part of MobileNext, including its HSS and Policy Controller/PCRF, both supported by the Subscriber Data Broker.
However, Juniper insists that the overall strategy to grow market share in the mobile core remains intact ‘ ‘to virtualize mobile networks and deliver innovation through our existing portfolio of backhaul, security, routing and edge services with products such as the MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers, SRX Series Services Gateways and JunosV App Engine software virtualization platform’, as a spokesperson put it in the report.
Sources say other products may soon be on the chopping block, including the Junos Content media delivery system, formerly known as MediaFlow and acquired with Ankeena Networks in 2010. This targets another area where Cisco has been aggressive, optimization of mobile and fixed networks to deliver video and multimedia more efficiently.
Juniper insists it has not killed Junos Content but the reports, combined with the abrupt end of MobileNext, reflect its recent strong shift towards a packet core strategy driven mainly by the fashionable SDN (software defined networking) technology, and its carrier-driven offshoot, NFV.
In an internal memo obtained by NetworkWorld, Daniel Hua, SVP of the routing business unit, wrote: ‘Despite our decision to EOL [end of life] MobileNext we remain committed to executing on all existing commitments to our customers and to the mobility space longer term. We believe we can meet the needs of our customers by providing the underlying virtualized mobile infrastructure (routing, switching, SDN and NFV) to enable customers to make this transition as well as offer specific virtualized network functions.’
A flagship product is now the virtualized, SDN version of Juniper’s Mobile Control Gateway based on its JunosV App Engine, which is shipping now on the MX router. The vendor appears to have more opportunities to differentiate itself from Cisco here than in the gateway segment, where the Starent platform is so well established. In 2011, it hoped to steal the initiative from Cisco by promising the ‘first open mobile core for 2G/3G and LTE networks’, but that openness boiled down to a range of partner products, from companies like Bridgewater and Openwave, being integrated, rather than the full flexibility of SDN.
Juniper is also creating a single router business by merging its edge services and routing divisions, bringing the MX and PTX platforms under the same roof and, in Hua’s opinion, increasing alignment of those two offerings with Juniper’s embedded and virtual services. He wrote in his memo: ‘Many of the network edge services were originally developed as extensions of the Junos OS within the routing business unit. We are realigning these services back to the original function, allowing us to strengthen and further innovate in the areas of our access, edge and core offerings through tighter integration of network services.’