Juniper Networks unveiled on Monday its JunosV Contrail family of products that includes the JunosV Contrail Controller for software-defined networks.

Now in trials with a number of service provider and enterprise customers, JunosV Contrail's promise is to reduce the time, cost and risk for customers to deliver new network and security services. It promises to do so by removing the need for manual configuration of complext network infrastructure to deploy new applications.

One of the customers testing the controller is AT&T. John Medamana, VP of network platforms at the company, said AT&T had been working with industry leaders to build an open, standards-based model for cloud services that integrate with the network-based services its enterprise customers rely on.

“From our early access to Juniper's JunosV Contrail solution we've seen that it has important capabilities that could help drive the evolution to virtualization and software defined networking,” he said.

JunosV Contrail products are built on intellectual property from Juniper's recent acquisition of Contrail Systems. According to Juniper, the virtual network solution easily integrates into existing data centers to centralize control across different client IT architectures and multiple cloud platforms.

The solution virtualizes the network to enable seamless automation and orchestration among private and public cloud environments, elastic management of IP-based network and security services, and a "Big Data for Infrastructure" offering for enhanced analytics, diagnostics and reporting.

Juniper said it was collaborating with other vendors, including Citrix, Cloudscaling, Mirantis and Red Hat, to provide complete cloud-based solutions based on open-source cloud operating systems OpenStack and CloudStack.

The company plans to make the new family of products available in the second half of 2013.