Juniper continues software transformation

Juniper has announced the first major innovation in its Service Layer Technology area, something it calls the Dynamic Services Architecture. This is a new product set, the first of which is the SRX Services Gateway, built on a platform that tightly couples service feature hosting and both signaling and control plane protocol handling. Cards are software-configurable to support multiple services, firewall services being the first announced.

This is the second of Juniper’s announcements that have created a “higher-than-the-network” layer of technology, the first being the company’s support of hosted control plane software for JUNOS. When you add this to the recent management changes at Juniper, it begins to look as though the company may be taking a turn more toward software and “transformation” versus routers and “convergence”.