Juniper Networks Delivers Better Experiences With Supply Chain Visibility From Component to Customer

With a mission to power connections and empower change, Juniper Networks aims to deliver network experiences that transform how people connect, work and live. Juniper’s networking solutions—which include both hardware and software infrastructure—support many of the world’s leading brands, including 18 of the 20 largest global banks and eight of the 10 top global retailers. Juniper’s customers have a wide variety of networking needs, which require different types of fulfillment and supply chain solutions—and maximizing data across all these partners is vital. 

“Our supply chain is probably one of the most important cogs in the Juniper wheel to enable solutions delivery to our customers,” says Ashu Gupta, Manufacturing Ops Director. Yet this outsourced supply chain, which includes a global network of manufacturing partners, presents a host of complexities for the Juniper team. Production for a single networking product could require up to 4,000 components and multiple suppliers in all corners of the world. Ensuring product quality, efficiency, on-time delivery and customer satisfaction is challenging—especially during periods of supply chain uncertainty. “Volatile markets have created unprecedented circumstances and made data more important than ever for building a resilient supply chain,” says Subhendu Roy, Senior Manufacturing Ops Manager.

Prior to Snowflake, Juniper’s data environment consisted of a patchwork of technologies, including an SAP data warehouse solution. Managing on-premises data infrastructure and sprawling system integrations required a large technical team. Functional data silos inhibited business intelligence and data science. Rising data volumes led to data pipeline failures and downtime, while scalability limitations and slow data ingestion limited access to timely insights. 

To overcome these challenges, Juniper reevaluated its data infrastructure, selecting Snowflake to centralize its enterprise data.

Today, Juniper’s data teams rely on Snowflake to enable an extensive data lake and data warehouse—all in a single environment. “Snowflake helps us achieve near-instant, near-unlimited scale to support a virtually limitless number of concurrent users and workloads,” Shanthakumar says. 

Bulk loading from Amazon S3 was key to Juniper’s first Snowflake-powered use case: a quality management solution for proactive manufacturing monitoring. “We can now trace product components that we’ve manufactured and shipped over the past few years,” Roy says. This initial success led to more Snowflake use cases and a hybrid data mesh architecture that centralizes data from around 30 disparate sources, including Juniper’s SAP ERP system. With Snowflake, data is now ingested in record time: loading 35 million records into the Data Cloud™ takes the team less than 10 minutes. Previously, it took 19 hours to load 8 million records in Juniper’s legacy data warehouse. 

Snowflake Secure Data Sharing also gives internal teams more access to data—with less engineering effort. “The data mesh acts as a powerhouse to provide data insights, achieve effective supply chains, reduce costs and digitize the business process for better operations and growth,” Shanthakumar says. 

Snowflake’s fully managed infrastructure allowed Juniper’s data teams to focus on higher impact projects, while Data Cloud capabilities like Zero-Copy Cloning, Time Travel and the ability to work with a wide array of industry-leading tools and technologies helped technical staff accelerate analytics.

By combining internal and external data in Snowflake, the Juniper team now has a scalable foundation for supply chain 360.

With Snowflake, Juniper teams prepare data 50% faster and quickly build functional Tableau dashboards. Then, they connect these dashboards to provide richer insights that reduce supply chain costs, ensure product quality and on-time delivery, manage risk and increase customer lifetime value. Since adopting Snowflake, Juniper has seen dashboard performance improve by 50%. 

“Our supply chain team is always working on backlog order management,” says Roy. “We used to refresh backlog data once per day, and that was not enough. Snowflake enables us to look at the backlog every two hours for better visibility in forecasting and planning.”

Teams across Juniper are benefiting from increased access to fresh, timely data. Commodity managers now rely on integrated supplier performance dashboards to monitor cost, quantity and delivery, while the planning team converts sales data into operating plans. Juniper’s leadership relies on management dashboards to stay informed about important KPIs like factory yield and lead time attainment.

Juniper believes its own success is determined by customers’ success, which spurred a new program, Juniper Support Insights (JSI), a service that helps Juniper customers reduce network mean time to resolution, improve network performance and derive more value from their products. For example, one customer used JSI to prevent over 10 outages, which led the company to save millions of dollars.

To equip customers with these on-demand insights, Juniper built JSI on Snowflake. Using Snowpipe and Snowpark-optimized warehouses allows Juniper to efficiently ingest and enrich device-level data at scale—while keeping costs low.

Empowering Juniper’s account and technical support teams with JSI also leads to a better experience for customers. Petrino says, “If something goes wrong or a renewal is coming up, both the customer and our teams see the same data.”

Moving forward, Juniper plans to continue expanding Snowflake use cases to increase supply chain efficiency—such as using Snowflake Secure Data Sharing to streamline collaboration with manufacturing partners—and achieve forward-thinking priorities. 

A top priority: advancing from a data-driven to an AI-driven organization. Shanthakumar says, “We are headed toward self-driving networks with minimal human intervention, and Snowflake will be a major player in our journey.”