Game changers was the theme at Juniper Networks NXTWORK 2019 event in London this week, with the highlight being an audience with a true game changer, John McEnroe. Appledore identified three network “game changing” ideas at the event. Edge and not a use case in sight Juniper’s CEO Rami Rahim, in his slides on edge, did something rare in the industry; he didn’t start his discussion with edge use cases. Instead, he talked about the structural change that edge brings to networks, and its position as a natural continuation of network/service disaggregation. In simple terms, Juniper positioned edge as the enabler of data and services disaggregation from the network data plane. Appledore believe the focus on specific compelling and killer edge applications is a problem, because it distracts from the open ended and unknown scope for edge innovation. It also hides the fact that edge is disruptive technology that does not necessarily drive vertically integrated solutions. By highlighting that edge is fundamentally the disaggregation of the data and services plane, Juniper neatly encapsulated the challenge of edge cloud for CSPs. If you can disaggregate the data plane at the edge, then anybody can innovate network based services at the edge. There is […]