To any IT or network pro, Juniper Mist’s value proposition might sound like a dream come true: self-optimising enterprise Wi-Fi that’s simple enough for even laypeople to manage. But how well does Juniper Mist really live up to its promises? And is it worth the investment? We sat down with Dicker Data’s network experts Tony Tran and Paul Wen to clear the air on Juniper Mist and find out where it offers the most potential value for New Zealand businesses.
Q: Where does Juniper Mist typically deliver the most value to an organisation?
Tony Tran, Senior Business Manager, Networks: Juniper Mist really shines in two areas: making network operations more efficient; and making network troubleshooting much simpler. That can not only yield substantial cost savings for businesses, but also free up huge amounts of time that their people can direct into more strategic areas.
One great example I can think of is a major retailer which used Juniper Mist to consolidate network management for more than 300 sites across both Australia and New Zealand. They needed a solution that was both quick to deploy and easy enough to manage that even end-users without an engineering background could do it. When those non-engineers tested a range of solutions after demos from the respective vendors – they found Juniper Mist’s technology was the only one easy enough to replicate on their own.
That also proved true in the actual roll-out. We were able to help the retailer pre-provision and deploy every Juniper access point with zero difficulty, despite the complexity and volume of sites involved.
Paul Wen, Solutions Architect, Networks: Another big benefit was Mist AI, which uses machine learning to predict how the network behaves and pick out the underlying cause when something malfunctions. To do this manually is like finding a needle in a haystack but Mist AI does this extremely accurately, especially as it trains on the organisation’s network performance over time. This has been so effective that some of that retailer’s IT staff have been able to pivot into a digital team focused on improving customer experience, adding even greater value to the brand.
Q: Everyone’s talking about AI-driven everything these days – what makes Juniper Mist any different?
PW: One thing is that they’ve been doing this far longer than most other players. Mist started with AI at its core from Day One in 2016. They’ve been building up a huge knowledge base on optimising network operations since then.
That’s also helped them develop AI-powered features that most other vendors still can’t offer. For example, a lot of network solutions now use AI to automatically choose channel or power settings for an optimal user experience.
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