Customer Success Story
Managed services provider Granite projects rapid growth of AI-driven SD-WAN
Granite Telecommunications turned legacy landlines into a $1.7 billion business. Early success came from helping customers consolidate their phone services with one point of contact and one invoice for all their office locations, a space neglected by the big telcos. Over the last two decades, Granite has distinguished itself with a passion for customer service.
Granite is a one-stop-shop for communication services for 6000 businesses and government customers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Juniper’s SD-WAN solution and Session Smart Router are foundational technologies in its next-generation managed SD-WAN service.
Overview
| Company | Granite Telecommunications |
| Industry | Service Provider |
| Products used | Session Smart Router, Wireless Access Points, EX Series |
| Region | Americas |
30%
Growth anticipated for managed SD-WAN services
10,000+
Automated deployments of SD-WAN connections per year
700,000
Customer locations served in the U.S. and Canada
5x
Higher customer retention rate than the telecom industry average
Create more customer value with SD-WAN
Granite was early to recognize the transformational power of SD-WAN to deliver better application experiences, improve agility, and cut customers’ telecom bills, and the company has offered SD-WAN since 2017. As a powerhouse in traditional telecom circuits, Granite has a built-in base of prospective customers for its next-generation SD-WAN services.
Granite looked for a way to help their customers scale as their businesses grew by upgrading from traditional circuits to SD-WAN.
Granite wanted to enhance the provisioning and scale of its managed SD-WAN services. With plans to deploy 12,000 Juniper-based endpoints per year, Granite needed a common infrastructure for operational consistency and efficiency.
A software-defined approach would allow Granite to deliver multiple network services over the same infrastructure more efficiently to customers. Virtualized SD-WAN, unified communications, Layer 3 Network Interface Device (L3NID), and other network functions could run on the same customer premise equipment, simplifying provisioning, and reducing the number of network elements to install and manage. Using commodity, white-box hardware would drive down costs, allowing Granite to offer competitively priced services.
Building networks with Juniper’s Flexible Service Edge technology
“We saw that Juniper was disrupting the market for SD-WAN,” says Kayla Zbinden, director of MSP product development at Granite. “Juniper’s service-centric fabric fit our idea of what we wanted for white-box customer premises equipment.”
Juniper’s Flexible Service Edge (FSE) solution, which starts as an intelligent L3NID and can be upgraded remotely with no hardware changes to SD-WAN, was an ideal fit for Granite.
With the Juniper Session Smart Router, Granite provides a flexible, application-aware fabric that allows it to meet its customers’ stringent performance, security, and availability requirements. Security is built into the Session Smart Router, protecting users and devices with zero trust deny-by-default access control. The inherent security of the Session Smart Router helped Granite meet the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance requirements of its retail, hospitality, and other customers.
Granite also offers managed SD-LAN services. Juniper’s AI-driven SD-LAN, offers automation, insights, and self-driving actions across wired and wireless domains, allowing service providers like Granite to deliver high performing, industry-recognized services across the wired and wireless domains.
SD-WAN is an engine of growth
Granite is rolling out hundreds of routers per week and 12,000 Juniper-based endpoints per year, making them the largest Session Smart Router managed service provider in the US.
Customers using traditional telecom services can advance to SD-WAN, reaping agility and cost advantages. Those using the company’s white box edge series hardware, called Granite FlexEdge, can easily add on more network services with a simple software change. Customers can scale capacity and network services up and down without any infrastructure disruption.
“With Juniper, we can enable service chaining on a flexible service edge, which differentiates us in a competitive market,” says Zbinden. “This approach to network service delivery aligns with how customers consume cloud resources, making it easier to upgrade or downgrade.”
With Mist AI and Juniper’s SD-WAN solution, Granite can provide customers with greater visibility and control over their traffic and reduce mean time to repair.
Granite Telecommunications Creates More Customer Value With SD-WAN
Granite is a one-stop-shop for communication services for businesses and government customers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Juniper’s SD-WAN solution and Session Smart Router are foundational technologies in its next-generation managed SD-WAN service.
The Products
Mist AI uses a combination of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and data science techniques to optimize user experiences and simplify operations across the wireless access, wired access, SD-WAN, Enterprise WAN Edge, data center, and security domains.
Juniper enables your business to scale elastically while minimizing capital investment through our modern cloud services that span the network and security domains.
Juniper security products offer threat detection, enforcement, and remediation through a comprehensive portfolio. Our next-generation firewalls, advanced threat prevention, threat intelligence, security orchestration, management, and analytics extend security across every point of connection across the network.
Improve the economics of networking with cloud-grade, high-density ethernet switching across your data center, campus, and branch.
Juniper is leading the convergence of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth® LE, and IoT with our enterprise-grade Access Points. The Juniper Access Points work in conjunction with the Juniper Mist Cloud Architecture and Mist AI to collect and analyze metadata in near real-time from all wireless clients.
Session Smart Router
Our software-defined router provides a flexible, application-aware network fabric that meets stringent enterprise performance, security, and availability requirements. Its Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) policy and URL filtering allow it to selectively enforce various attack detection and prevention techniques on network traffic.
The EX Series Ethernet Switches are cloud-ready, high-performance access and aggregation/core layer switches designed for enterprise branch, campus, and data center networks. Wired access networks don’t have to be complex—you can reduce risk and cost without compromising performance, quality, and innovation.
Published June 2022