Establishing a business case for HPE Juniper Networking’s Mist AI

Discover how HPE Juniper Networking’s Mist AI slashes costs, reduces network trouble tickets by up to 90%, and frees your IT team to innovate – delivering measurable ROI for any organization

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The creation of HPE Juniper Networking opens up interesting questions for organizations around the world. For HPE customers, there’s the tantalizing prospect of modernizing their network with Mist AI. For those new to HPE and Juniper Networks, the obvious question of whether this is the time to switch. In this article, we focus on the simple matter of money: what return of investment can Mist AI deliver?

Here, the key is spending every dollar in the wisest way possible. For example, if you can cut the cost of keeping the lights on – all that time spent answering user queries, tackling tickets – by 80%, 90%, then that frees up budget for actual investment. Those aren’t random figures: that’s the level of improvement seen by HPE Juniper customers ServiceNow and Bethesda Medical.

Or consider something equally tangible such as downtime. Cutting this week on week, month on month, year on year, equates to money on every organization’s bottom line. Here, then, we cover the genuine return on investment you can expect by switching to a modern, AI-driven network.

Reduction of service tickets (and faster processing when they come in)

When building a business case for any new product, it helps to make it easy to understand – and backed up by hard data. A reduction of service tickets is one such example.

“One of our customers is ServiceNow,” explained Jeff Aaron, VP of Product Marketing at HP Juniper Networking during a recent webinar entitled ‘AI-Native NOW: The New Era.’ “They were on a Race to Zero to get to zero trouble tickets, and I’m embarrassed to say we only got them to 90% [reduction] so far,” he said.

“That’s an example where you have automation and you can keep feeding things into an AI engine, where it keeps getting better, the trouble tickets stop coming in in a good way,” Aaron added.

Sunalini Sankhavaram, VP Product Management, AIOps for Enterprise Networking at HPE Juniper Mist, expanded on the topic later in the same talk. “ServiceNow sees a 90% reduction in network trouble tickets,” she said. “And Blue Diamond Growers have seen 80% less time managing the network because they’re now innovating and doing more automation workflows while the network is still driving itself and making sure that the users on that network are having the best experience possible.”

Avoid unplanned network downtime

Unplanned network downtime harms productivity, sales opportunities and can sometimes stop an organization in its tracks. Organizations that rely on 24/7 operations, including hospitals and government agencies, particularly rely on the tools built into HPE Juniper Mist AI that allow them to not only remotely solve problems when they arise but actually anticipate them before they happen.

Downtime affects every organization differently, but there is hard data thanks to research by Forrester Data. Using a composite organization, it found that switching to the Mist platform – in conjunction with Juniper switches and access points, “reduces the composite’s unplanned downtime by 95% by Year 3”. This equated to almost $1 million in recouped profit.

Need-to-knows for connectivity demands

Modern networks are under pressure to support increasingly dense, distributed environments whilst enabling new AI-driven applications.

Meeting these demands requires more than incremental upgrades. Technologies like Wi-Fi 7, private 5G, and high-performance wired infrastructure are reshaping enterprise connectivity, but their full value is only unlocked through AI-powered network management.

Discover how to build a more flexible, future-ready network strategy in this downloadable whitepaper.

Let Marvis AI solve problems automatically – before they even happen

While we all understand what a self-driving car is, few people realize that a self-driving network already exists via HPE Juniper Network’s Marvis AI. How much control you give Marvis to take actions itself is up to you, explained Sankhavaram.

You “can either give it permission to self-drive,” she said, “or it can just be what we call a driver assist mode where Marvis can still notify you of the reasons that are causing a bad experience that it’s predicting, and you can then take the action as an operator to go resolve that problem [or] tell Marvis to go fix the issue.”

This is all due to advanced usage of agentic AI where Mist AI can emulate scenarios, such as a busy Monday morning of Zoom calls, to anticipate where the problems might occur – and fix these “bad user minutes” to use Sankhavaram’s term.

Forrester’s research places the three-year value as nearly $237,000 for the composite organization.Avoid the cost of maintaining legacy infrastructure

If you’re using ageing hardware anywhere in your network then it can silently add to your costs. This is especially true if it can’t be remotely managed, but also if the user interface is confusing. One of the great benefits of Mist AI is its support for natural language queries, allowing IT teams without decades of experience with a manufacturer to jump to exactly the right setting.

Again using Forrester Data figures, that equates to savings of almost $700,000 over three years for the composite organization it created. “This benefit quantifies the costs the composite organization would incur to maintain its legacy network infrastructure,” states the report. “In that alternative scenario, it would replace part of the outdated hardware each year so that the network would not fail — basically what needed to be done to maintain the status quo without catastrophic consequences.”

Making the business case for Mist AI

Here’s the central premise for anyone considering a switch to HPE Juniper Networking Mist AI: by modernizing your network, and taking advantage of the clear benefits of AI, you will spend less time firefighting and more time creating the conditions the organization needs to thrive. It’s about ensuring that you’re spending every single dollar wisely.

A modern network should scale with your business. It should free up the IT team’s time to spend on things that matter. It should shift each dollar from the day-to-day to longer term strategy.

For more information, we recommend signing up for HPE Juniper Networking webinars, downloading the Forrester Report and reading “Making the Business Case for Network Modernization.”