Market overview

This section provides an overview of a selection of vendors’ Smart Network Management offerings. The overview covers a selection of the main products/services available; it does not provide an exhaustive list of each vendor’s offering.

Details have been provided for Juniper, HPE (Aruba), Cisco, and Extreme Networks. These vendors were selected as they are all in the top right of Gartner’s® Magic Quadrant™ for Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure 2024, meaning that they have been independently judged by Gartner to be market leaders in terms of the quality of their strategic vision and their ability to deliver it. 

In 2015 HPE acquired Aruba Networks to form HPE Aruba Networking Central, a cloud-native network management solution. Aruba Networking offers a single location to view and manage all wired and wireless local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and virtual private networks (VPNs) across multiple site locations. The solution also provides advanced analytics to help troubleshoot and optimise network performance. Future versions of Aruba Networking Central will include the ability to automatically reconfigure the network in response to any potential or identified faults and threats.

Aruba Central is available in on-premise and cloud-hosted variants. Artificial intelligence (AI) functionality is only available when using the cloud variant, and most customers use this version.

HPE Aruba Networking Central integrates with various IT service management (ITSM) platforms such as Service Now and BMC, allowing service tickets to be automatically raised once an incident is detected whilst also enabling incident categorisation (for example hardware failure, software issue) and prioritisation (impact and urgency). 

HPE Aruba also provide ClearPass, (Figure 13) a policy management platform for onboarding new devices onto networks. The role-based solution provides unified network access enforcement across multi-vendor wireless, wired and VPN networks. ClearPass provides policy configuration templates and troubleshooting tools and supports multiple authentication sources. It uses a zero-trust approach and provides the ability for users to onboard their own devices through a self-service portal, a customisable process depending on the client.

Figure13: Aruba ClearPass Dashboard. Source: Aruba Networks

At the beginning of 2024, HPE acquired Juniper Networks, Inc., a specialist in cloud and AI networks. Juniper’s Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA) uses Juniper’s Mist AI to help IT teams manage wired and wireless access.

Figure 16: Marvis Virtual Network Assistant. Source: Juniper Networks

Marvis is part of Juniper’s AI-native network support model which uses data from network applications and learns from it. The solution provides proactive and prescriptive actions, self-driving network operations, digital experience twinning and integrated help desk functions.

Juniper claims that Marvis provides faster issue resolutions for clients, greater network insights, the ability to proactively identify and resolve issues, improve network visibility and quickly support ticket responses through the use of Mist AI.

Juniper also offers Marvis Minis (Figure 17) which are simulated user connections that learn network configuration using machine learning. Marvis Minis simulate user application use and can proactively highlight network issues such as misconfigured VLANs, application errors and incorrect firewall rules.

Figure 17:  Marvis Mini Dashboard. Source:  Juniper

Cisco has a long history of involvement in wired and wireless LAN management across many sectors, including healthcare. Cisco’s development roadmap is moving the organisation from hardware-based solutions to software solutions and increasing interoperability with other manufacturers’ solutions. The driving principle is to “enable platforms that are adaptable, easier to deploy and manage, and provide users with actionable insights that were previously unavailable or were extremely complex to maintain.”. To deliver this, there is a focus on automation, orchestration, visibility, and open standards-based integration.

Their primary offering related to smart network management is the Cisco Catalyst Centre. Formerly known as the DNA Centre, the Catalyst Centre provides a network management system for wired and wireless networks, with additional network tools for design, development, visibility, analysis, dimensioning and reporting. The system and associated platforms enable efficient network management, with the ability to use machine learning for network analysis and artificial intelligence to support task automation.

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is a security policy management platform that provides a single point for network management. The platform helps network managers control all endpoints on the network, understand who is accessing them and manage resource use. The platform supports integration of security policies across networks and device authentication, onboarding and guest management

Cisco ThousandEyes monitors the performance of applications and services across the cloud and the Internet and enables visibility of different types of networks. The solution enables network managers to identify and resolve issues using real-time insights about network behaviour.

Another relevant Cisco solution is Cisco AI EndPoint Analytics. This solution leverages AI and machine learning to generate network insights about endpoints and network behaviour. The solution helps organisations identify threats and anomalies and improve network performance through the real-time data the analytics platform produces. The solution can help identify compromised devices and identify steps for network managers to protect infrastructure.   

Cisco Meraki is a cloud-managed networking and security solution supporting quick deployment and configuration of networks. The solution enables the configuration of user devices, AP management, firewalls, security appliances, switches and gateway administration, and cloud management.

Cisco Spaces is a cloud-based location service platform that provides network managers with a dashboard for locating and visualising user/device locations (Fig. 18). This can enable the identification of key healthcare assets across various locations, business insights, improved customer experience, safety and compliance, and internet of things (IoT) integration.

Figure 18 Cisco Spaces Dashboard. Source: Cisco Spaces

Like other providers, Extreme Networks offers a range of products and services that come under the smart network management banner.

A core component of the Extreme Networks offer for smart network management is the Extreme Cloud IQ. This product provides visibility of wired, wireless, SD-WAN and Extreme Fabric networks. In addition, Extreme Cloud IQ offers a pilot/co-pilot model for developing a network digital twin so network managers can trial and test potential designs and configurations. The product offers initiative insights, network analysis, device management and network remediation.

In addition, the Extreme Cloud IQ Site Engine offers end-to-end network management, with task automation, analytics service assurance and orchestration (Fig. 19). It provides a role-based network access control for devices and can support cloud migration and management. Site Engine offers an open API to support integrations with enterprise platforms such as ServiceNow, which enables automatic support tickets to be raised, reducing the administrative burden for network managers.

Smart Network Management functionality will continue to advance in the coming years as new technologies and capabilities become available.

As leading vendors have identified, AI and machine learning already play a role within smart network management, although this can be limited by the emerging nature of this technology and customers’ trust in it. Use is likely to increase in coming years as capabilities and levels of trust increase. This capability will likely include providing greater levels of analytics, diagnostics, troubleshooting and visualisation of networks and their use. In addition, these services will be able to carry out a higher degree of self-repair and other appropriate actions in response to any potential emerging issues.

As networks continue to become more complex with increased numbers and variety of devices and users, the threat of attacks also becomes greater. It is likely that smart networks will continue to evolve in terms of their cybersecurity capabilities, using AI and machine learning to manage new threats, mitigate their impact and automatically designate and manage when any occur.

The continued shift to the cloud means that extending Smart Network Management to provide visibility of the user experience of these cloud applications will become increasingly important. This capability already exists and is likely to be increasingly used by health organisations as more of their services shift to the cloud.