 and some of the initiatives around getting our, you know, some of our younger girls K through 12 engaged in STEM programs and such and really this is the best it's been, you know, from a women in technology perspective, lots of opportunities, lots of exciting, you know, companies to work for. I'm Beena Hallman, Vice President of IBM Software-Defined Storage and you're watching The Cube. Live from Santa Clara, California, extracting the signal from the noise. It's The Cube, covering Nextwork 2015, brought to you by Juniper Networks. Now your host, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here at Live in Silicon Valley to special Cube presentation of Juniper Networks customer summit. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Engines. Stu Miniman, analyst at wikibon.com covering infrastructure, cloud, and we are here with John White with Expedient Director of Product Strategy. Welcome to The Cube. Hey, thanks for having me. So we're kind of winding down the day here, great event, a lot of action. Their first customer summit, which is great to see Juniper get real intimate with their customers. It's been fantastic to be part of. A lot of interesting new trends, also some big news. The disaggregation of the Junos is big, the new switches, a lot of great stuff. What's your take on the event? Yeah, the event's been fantastic. I've attended a lot of the sessions, which are pretty awesome, as they're, you know, I don't know if it's politically correct, but they're quite nerdy, right? So they're more engineering focused, which is great. So you don't just have some marketing person up there kind of giving you, you know, what it might look like in the future. They're giving you the reality of what's actually happening right now at an engineering level. So they're open alarms pretty much there. Essentially, this isn't their opportunity to open the Kimono show customer and hear from them. Is there some good dialogue back and forth? Yeah, absolutely. The questions have been fantastic. There's a lot of, you know, takeaway options too. So it's really good. I mean, you work with a company and you understand probably the segment that you're most focused in, but it's great to come to events like this and try to get everything else out of it, right? To kind of get exposure to different things. So they've touched a lot on what they're working on with OpenStack and some of the integrations that they had with VMware that I wasn't even real, I didn't really understand. So it's great to kind of hear that. And then you get a little Amazon thing going on here. What's the top conversation that you're hearing in the hallways in the sessions? What's the scuttle about? What's some of the buzz? Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot more people talking about, you know, maybe what they're doing, you know, with that NFX appliance that people are pretty interested in, you know, where they can kind of extend that. I know as myself as a customer, that's pretty interesting for me is I'm actually working with my customers, you know, local inside of my data centers, but as well as on-premise. So being able to put an appliance out there and kind of extending out what that network might look like that I have already running in my data centers is pretty interesting. So people are talking, you know, about that. People are talking about Contrail a lot more than I've heard in the past, which is great to hear. So in some of the ways that kind of could integrate and kind of, as you're building maybe that application cloud for the future, have, you know, a different and open standard for that open defined network. Yeah. So John, could you give us a little bit of detail on Expedient's business, you know, you know, where you serve customers and just kind of a thumbnail of the company itself? Sure, yeah. So Expedient's been around for quite some time now. We focus on providing IT solutions for our customers. We focus on infrastructure to service. We run 11 data centers in seven different markets. We really run the gamut as far as what we do, but we pride network solutions, data center solutions to handle those physical workloads that still around and present with us, as well as we do a lot of managed services, cloud services, running one of the larger VMware clouds inside of the United States out of our four walls. And we service our customers mainly on the East Coast, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee is our newest market in Indianapolis. So those those kind of tier two NFL football cities. Excellent. In the keynote this morning, you know, Juniper talked about how really they're transitioning their business going to more of a software model. I have to think that kind of aligns a little bit better with, you know, how your business is, you know, how is it to do business with Juniper? And how do you see them changing to kind of serve service providers even better? Yeah, we've had a great experience working with Juniper to kind of give you an example from financial levels. I mean, we've almost quadrupled our spend in the past 12 months with Juniper as they've really aligned towards cloud service providers in a great way. So they do it a few different ways that are pretty important to us. We get early access to a lot of product engineering so we can go and work with them to kind of go to market with product strategies. We did that a lot with the VSRX environment and we really run the stack with Juniper. We use MX, we use QFX, EX and then SRX. And what's interesting about kind of way Rami's taking it with a software, you know, method is really that that's kind of how we do our business today. We actually sell, you know, things per gig of bandwidth or per gig of RAM. And that's the way they're looking to take these things, which is great because then I don't really have to do a conversion of, okay, I bought X amount of ports, I can get X amount of revenue out of it with X amount of customers. It's just a general transition. So they're basically aligning with the way we're selling. So it's been a pretty awesome partnership to kind of have all those things coming together, not only just understanding the products a little bit deeper, but also working on how we can kind of go to market and go to, you know, sell the stuff together, which is nice. Yes, as you look at all the suppliers that you work with, is this a general trend, you know, is Juniper kind of leading the edge of kind of that transformation or where do things sit? It's a general trend across all suppliers. However, Juniper is doing a pretty awesome job at it. And they definitely were one of the first to kind of realize that and they've always been focused on the carriers and the service providers. So it's natural for them, but they created a separate team. So we get separate support, separate sales support, focus on the service providers. So those people understand our business pretty awesome and they even help us on the marketing side of things as well. So it's a true partnership there, where we're doing lunch and learns and exposing our customers and prospects to new Juniper technology in the way we're utilizing them. We're doing that together instead of just, you know, expedient doing it on our own. Okay. And how does cloud fit into the general conversation that your customers are having today and, you know, what piece of their business do they come to you for? Yeah, majority of our customers in the past have kind of brought in their gear into our four walls, whether they're physically co-locating it or then putting it inside of our virtual infrastructure. In the past, you know, 12 months we've seen a shift though, and we've started to shift our business where we're starting to talk to them about how we can kind of cloudify their on-premise solution almost. So giving them that cloud vision, that cloud path, by putting hardware out on their site, getting them, you know, to not worry about the how to deploy a line or how to deploy a network switch or what the performance might look like, you know, removing a lot of those kind of general just problems that they have by utilizing our services, our support, you know, it helps give them a better vision, allows them to really focus on their applications and their workloads instead of kind of dealing with the mundane hardware that we see today. So the customer's starting to shift a lot, and I think it's going to be a big thing for us in 2016. What's the big trend right now in terms of software? Because software is to the forefront now, you're seeing that in everybody. Juniper in particular, what are you noticing about that? Yeah, so I mean the software, you know, coming in a lot of different layers, I mean, even, you know, one of the things we're looking at pretty heavily in our R&D labs is how we can leverage software at the network layer to really gain some operational efficiencies and, you know, ease of deployment, policy management to do certain things. So that's helping us out, you know, tremendously, that that software push there. On the security side, it's really getting interesting. I mean, we have so many different software, you know, opportunities, I guess, to prevent malicious attacks or to find out about malicious attacks or block a certain style traffic that trying to manage all the different software portion, you know, software providers out there is pretty tough. Hearing what Juniper is doing with, you know, trying to consolidate and I think it was in the keynote where they talked about, you know, we don't want to make secure, you know, we want to make secure networks in the future. So some of the concept of, you know, the VSRX kind of being at the edge, it's seeing maybe a layer seven issue and then going downstream to the EX or the QFX or the MX to then block it at a layer two, layer three path is pretty interesting to kind of make that stack kind of whole. So, you know, we have software solutions everywhere, security networks seem to be kind of biggest hotbed for us though right now. So can you give us a little more detail on security, how much of it is Juniper taking care of, how much are you kind of supplementing with, you know, other software packages and, you know, what are your customers asking you about security today? Yes, the compliance has drove a lot of our business over the years. We started doing, you know, PCI compliance back in 2008, 2009 for some of our e-commerce customers were continuing to see that come up and orders are continuing to drive that as well. And, you know, really security in our eyes is a lot like auto insurance, right? Nobody wants to pay that bill every month until they get into that car accident. And, you know, with the amount of breaches that are being exposed in the news, we're seeing our customers start to, you know, want everything that they're talking about. So if they hear in the news that it was breached because they didn't have two factor authentication, our customers want that and expect that. If they find out that they didn't have encryption at a higher up end of the stack that the data was stolen from a drive or something like that, they want that style of encryption. So we've really, we've built an Alucard model for our customers to buy that and to buy those security services. So they can pick and choose exactly what they want from us. And at the end, all that's really doing is complementing what they're doing from an IT strategy to then satisfy their auditors or the compliance requests that they might have. That's critical too, because we heard no networks are the same. So the security also maps that you can't, there's no general purpose security solution. I wish there was kind of a magic bolt that I could just, you know, have everybody buy for $10,000, you know, whatever it might be. And then all the security woes go away. It's not like that, especially as everybody's doing something a little bit different. Everybody's application is a little bit different. They really, you know, and what their auditors are asking for, we might have the same audit request come from three different auditors, but we can satisfy it probably in five different ways. So how we kind of shape that in the future is always going to be a challenge for us. But I think, you know, the more we can kind of do inside of the software is going to help us at least write policies to then make sure that what we're putting in place in the beginning and what we're getting satisfied by the auditors will stay that way in the future. And I think that's going to be a pretty powerful thing for us. So how does SDN fit into kind of your architecture and what you're doing? So SDN today is really still in our R&D labs, and it's something that's probably going to come out more in our private cloud offerings than it does in our public cloud offerings, just because of some of the operational costs that go along with that. You know, we're finding it, you know, interesting as all these things are starting to merge together, right? The engineers that we need to run this, they need to be versed in everything. They need their network systems. They probably even have to have a programming background as well. We see a tremendous future and what we can bring with that to make sure that, you know, the policies are staying enforced. It's almost like the same benefits we saw out of being able to deploy, you know, automation tools. You know, in the beginning, there's kind of a lot of work, but then as soon as you get all that work done, it's, you know, a level kind of scaling as you kind of scale or level kind of time commitment as you scale out, we kind of view SDN being the same way, being able to kind of minimize, you know, maybe the past that needs its touch and some of the, you know, the routing that you can do inside of, we were mainly a VMware shop. What you can do at the ESX layer is pretty cool for us as we can kind of maybe mitigate some of the traffic that might get outside of the network that might have an exposure point. So we can kind of minimize what that horizontal plane looks like that we might actually get, you know, a breach occurring at. One of the tweets I'm reading here says, the QFX5800 is launched, Dash, what a monster. Describe the impact of that product relative to the Juniper. I mean, why are they calling it a monster? I mean, obviously it's a compliment. It's a beast monster, whatever it is. It's not that it's ugly or has three eyes or anything like that. It's a powerhouse. I mean, being able to go and, you know, having those types of speeds available to you, you know, as a data center and a cloud service provider is pretty awesome. I mean, aggregating 10 gig was kind of the way we handled in the past. Being able to go to 25 gig is great. And then if we can kind of get some sort of, you know, n plus 25 standard, it'll be awesome. So we can continue just daisy chain them together to basically build this high end network bandwidth to kind of reduce the maybe the complexity that we might have in our environment is pretty fun. Yeah. So, John, you've got a pretty good relationship with Juniper. You know, what sort of things do Juniper and the rest of the industry need to do to make your jobs easier, help you serve your customers better? Focus a lot on the business solutions. I mean, that's really at the end of the day, what we're trying to solve for our customers is focusing on, you know, what value that we have to kind of solve that IT problem for them. If, you know, the suppliers just listened to everything we'd say, it would be pretty easy for us, right? I mean, because we just say, okay, this is the problem we have, you need to solve it, that'd be great. But it doesn't always work that way. So it's communicating with us then, you know, those roadmaps and where you see the future. So we can kind of start and have that, you know, natural conversation together and make sure we end up in a very similar place. So we can go to market with a similar strategy that you're already building towards. Yeah. So, you know, you brought up 25 gig. How much, you know, is there kind of demand on your side to push towards this high level of speeds? Is it kind of the traditional price economics that are holding things back? Or, you know, what are the limitations for looking forward to? I mean, Juniper's talking about 100 gig a bunch. Yeah, truth be told, I mean, there's the way we kind of built our environment. I mean, we've built on, you know, trying to minimize what that blast radius might look like. So we've always done, you know, a lot of essentially horizontal scale out by nature. We do it inside of the way we build data centers. So we actually build multiple data centers inside of a city, inside of a smaller pocket. So the chances of us actually having to get to something, you know, the speeds like that inside of one data center probably won't happen as we've already horizontally spared things out. The great thing about it, though, is that we could and we don't have those limitations. We don't have those boundaries. We don't know what, you know, the data transfer rates are going to look like in the future. So knowing that we have those options is a pretty great place to kind of be as you kind of get some, you can sleep better at night knowing that that won't ever be a problem. You know the bandwidth is always going to be there for you. John, final question. Talk about the event customer summit here. Again, very intimate for the folks watching that are customers or partners, mostly customers that aren't here. What are they missing? What's happening and why should they come next year? Yeah, absolutely. You know, make sure you come next year. I have three engineers with me that traveled out for this trip. They've already passed a whole bunch of certifications. The certifications testing was free, which was pretty awesome. So they did that and they're getting a lot of chance to actually have one-on-one to face-to-face times. I don't know how many times I've heard in these sessions is, oh, it's so great to kind of put a face to the name. So these are the people that are running these product roadmaps and actually building out the engineering details of the spec of the product. Those are the people that are here. So if you want to talk to them, meet them face-to-face to kind of get your opinion heard, this is a great place to be. And they're being transparent, so you get a chance to actually ask pointed questions. Certainly it's almost like a freak consulting in a way. That's exactly it. I mean it's like it's like almost like, you know, an executive briefing on steroids, right? Is you just have all these people of all these different subjects talking all at the same time. And what's even cool was like I had a great lunch conversation. We were talking with some different engineers from different companies. You know, hearing my engineers kind of talk with their engineers and going back and forth and hearing about their problems, it was pretty fun. I mean, one of my engineers that I have out with me, Brian, he's focused a ton on us on the SRX product line and mainly the VSRX. He's giving basically advice and helping, you know, sell it for Juniper essentially on what we've done with it and how we've done things. So pretty cool solutions with it. And it's kind of great to hear that interaction. One nugget of insight could really change the game. Absolutely. To save you guys from hitting the speed bump or potentially scaling architectural decisions you guys are making. Yeah. And having the small kind of, you know, the small forum and I don't think I don't think it's going to be small forever, but having the small forum like it is today has made it a lot more personal, I think, than a lot of the other conferences that I get to. John, thanks for sharing the time with us on here in theCUBE and sharing your insight and the data. Appreciate it. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more live coverage of Juniper's next work and XT work, hashtag NXT work, Juniper's customer summit. We'll be right back with more of this short break. Walsh, I'm Benny Schneider. I'm Eric Herzog. I'm Calvin Zito. I'm Kevin Deerling. And I'm a Cube alumni. And I'm a Cube alumni. And I'm the Cube alumni. And I'm a Cube alumni. And I'm a Cube alumni. I'm a Cube alumni. Since the dawn of big data, the Cube has been there, connected with executives, practitioners, entrepreneurs, thought leaders. But you're not a thought leader anymore. You're a futurist. That's the new trend. Futurist is the buzzword. No, I'm not. I'm very much living in the past. I don't like the future. And I don't think much of the present. Damn, John Cleese. There's a lot of people out there who have no idea what they're doing, but they have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they're doing. And those are the ones with the confidence of stupidity who finish up in power. That's why the planet doesn't work. Knowledgeable, insightful, and a true gentleman. And the guy at the counter recognized me and said, are you listening?