 Live from Santa Clara, California, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Nextwork 2015. Brought to you by Juniper Networks. Now your host, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hello everyone, welcome to a special CUBE presentation. We are here live in Santa Clara at the Marriott in the shadow of Levi's Stadium for Juniper's next work event, their customer summit. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, co-host Stu Miniman this week. We're here all day. Wall-to-wall coverage of Juniper's exclusive news, analysis, conversations around the future of Juniper, the future of the network, the future of software. Our next guest is Jennifer Blatnick, who's the vice president of portfolio marketing for cloud and enterprise. Welcome to the CUBE. Thank you so much. I love Juniper because it's a Silicon, one of those Silicon Valley companies that just keeps innovating and innovating, but the tide has shifted over the years and you've seen the evolution of the network. The cloud is here, mobile. The things that we've all predicted saw that in 2009. Pradeep, the founder of Juniper, is still around on, you know me, I love when founders, lead companies, are still pumping because you always have that visionary. But he saw the future of mobile, he saw the future of apps and Junos was ahead of its time. I always said that back in 2010 timeframe. But a lot of exciting new stuff here with software at the center of the value proposition, big data, things like that. Junos has changed, so give us the quick update. What's the big news with Junos and how does that affect the enterprise? How does that affect the market? Sure, so thanks again for having me on the show. You know, we're really excited about Junos because like you said, we've always been open, right? We've always had open APIs. We've allowed customers to operate scripts directly on our platforms and we've really just taken this, you know, another, our open ecosystem further today. Today we announced software desegregation or software unleashed. So now you can actually start to run Junos on any third-party hardware. Other vendors hardware or white box hardware, you know, we announced that at the end of last year. Or you can run other third-party software on our hardware, right? If you love Juniper for their hardware, then, you know, we've given you the ability also to either write your own software or run third-party software on your hardware. You know, I love the tech business. I've been in it all my life and it's so exciting. Now we have theCUBE and Stu and I analyze, go to all the events. And the word religious war has always come up in tech. And that's about the platform, philosophies, right? So you're seeing a big engineered systems that's Oracle and integrating into the stack. And then you're seeing more of open, more of the horizontally scalable, which has been what's been driving the cloud and the enterprise, software-defined networking. So you see different philosophies. Where does the open Junos fit in? Because there are people that still want to tune and build on industry standard hardware, white boxes and talk about the differences and the trade-offs between the two philosophies, if you can. Sure, well, I mean, the reason why I think we have disaggregated software is because we want to allow customers that flexibility of choice. And if, you know, they're not ready to go there yet, we can actually transition them by selling them, you know, our software and our hardware bundled together, right? So it's all about customer choice at the end of the day and how do they transition and when they want to transition and giving them that flexibility. With software-defined networking, right, what you are really enabling is flexibility and agility. But to get there overnight is a bit daunting for a lot of our customers, right? And you want to be able to know that you can operate, you know, your network today, but modernize and transition for the future. And that's really what we're offering customers is a solution for today, but the ability to convert it for the future also. What's that daunting? What's daunting to them? Is it just the scope? Is it the personnel? Is it the tech? Is it the tuning? No, it's all of it. I mean, you know, just exactly like you brought up, you know, partly there's culture, right? I mean, that's a huge part of the equation. No doubt, right? Is the people and, you know, comfort level of how I do my job today and how things have always been done. But then you also have the revolutionaries, you know, who come in and like, we need to do things differently now, right? We need DevOps. We need agile. We need SDN. Exactly. Those are the revolutionaries. Yes, and the revolutionaries are great, right? They're visionaries, but at the same time, you have to run a business in the meantime, right? To fund those revolutionaries and the revolutionary ideas. And this is essentially what, you know, we give you when we're giving you, you know, this new software disaggregation is the ability to transition and modernize, right? And to know that in the future, you can move and migrate to an SDN world where you get that ultimate agility. So, Jennifer, I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit of your customer's perspective on this. When I look at networking, you know, it's really broad. There's so many sub-segments out there. You've got kind of the hyperscale guys which we heard in the keynote say, these cloud guys, they're buying this way. I mean, if you look at how Amazon does things, if you look at Facebook, what they're doing with OCP, it's, you know, software and, you know, leveraging, you know, various hardware platforms and those are kind of two separate pieces. You know, Juniper has a strong history in the carriers and the service providers. And then you've got the enterprise which spans everything from the really big guys that try to look like service providers down to, you know, folks that are like, you know, hey, I don't have, you know, network engineers. I don't have, you know, I've got a couple of IT guys and I'm just trying to keep things up and running and figure out what we do. So, you know, big spectrum, lots going on. How does disaggregation fit in? What are you hearing from your customers? Sure, I mean, you know, Stu, you bring up a great point, right? You know, at Juniper, our heritage is with service providers and with carriers, whether it be traditional telco type carriers or web 2.0 type carriers, right? And these carriers, you know, they have their own unique problems, right? You know, definitely high-scale is one of them. But you'll be, you know, I think interested to know that a lot of these web 2.0 service provider carriers, their goal is actually to run their operation centers with just one or two personnel. It's not like they have huge operations. They want their knock to be, you know, a handful of personnel, which is actually great because the innovation and technology we're doing with them at the bleeding edge, we can bring and down into the enterprise where they really only can have, you know, a few personnel to operate the whole data center. And so it's about simplification of architecture and being able to bring that simplification of architecture and automation down so that enterprises can benefit, you know, with all of the innovation that we've done with some of our larger carriers. Yeah, the other message that I was really happy to hear in the keynote this morning was talking about automation because, I mean, that's central. If you talk about how do you simplify the environment? You talked about some of your, you know, giant customers that say do massive scale, you know, they spend the time architecting it so that they don't have to run around tweaking knobs and fixing things. So talk about, you know, what Juniper's doing, the new offerings from the automation standpoint. Yeah, you know, automation is all about removing kind of the rogue, you know, mundane cut and paste tasks, right, and human error, frankly. And it applies not only to, you know, building and configuring and installing a network, but it also applies to security of the network, quite frankly, because so much of, you know, the security risks actually have to do with essentially human error, right? And so what you want to do is remove that element out of the network. You want to remove the mundane tasks and use those resources, that human resources to really provide, to provide higher, you know, advanced intelligence into your network to actually make decisions, not go do research and figure out what problem is wrong. You want to simplify your network so that you can quickly identify any problems that are in your network, be it, you know, network issues or a security issue or possible security threat, quickly identify it and quickly deal with it, right? Whether it is implementing a new policy, putting something into a sandbox, shutting off a port, you know, VLAN, whatever it might be. But, you know, you want all of those workflows to be automated so that you can basically bring your level of risk down. So talk about the IoT question we saw on the CrowdChat. Go to CrowdChat.net, that's nxtwork, if you're watching, ask us questions. But one of the questions came up was, how does IoT affect the network and also the internal fire, inside the firewall? And use that as a context to explain what this meta-fabric announcement is, because that's interesting, because now you're looking at an operating system of the data center, the software-driven world. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, IoT, obviously, everyone talks about the bandwidth and, you know, but, you know, the bigger issue is essentially that you've now created a larger surface area of network security risks into your network, right? Every point now is either a point of enforcement, you can see it that way, or a point of threat, right? Well, the perimeter's dead. I mean, there's no more perimeter with APIs in openness. Absolutely. The perimeter model is no longer available. Well, the perimeter's everywhere and it's nowhere, right? That's essentially what happens, right? It becomes, you know, again, back to the point of every point can be a point of enforcement, or every, you know, or you have no edge and no perimeter. And that's essentially where you really have to look at things like software-defined secure networks. This is one of the things that we've started to embark on is really looking at, you know, how you can utilize the network to be security-centric so that every point of your network can be a point of enforcement and that you can apply policies to the network that make business sense and you're not translating between business and technical, right? So, for example, a lighting fixture that could be an IoT device in your network that is, you know, a Tier V device, if you will, and that Tier V device should not be accessing your HR database, right? So you want to be able to, you know, apply those types of policies onto your network. And that's what we talk about when we talk about software-defined secure networks is really being able to apply business policies in terms of security risks to your network and not, you know, just look at, you know, VLANs and user-based access. What does security-centric mean, ultimately, for Juniper? Security-centric really means looking at security from how you build and architect the network and not just as a bolt-on. That's really the difference, right? You know, just to your point earlier, John, look, you know, with the perimeter gone, you know, what do you secure? It doesn't mean that you don't need to secure the perimeter, but it just means that every point of your network actually is a perimeter and that's where the ideas behind micro-segmentation come in, right? And, you know, you brought up Metafabric earlier, right? In Metafabric, right? We look at the architecture, and again, transitioning customers to help them understand where do you apply your security policies? Is it at the tour, right? Is it down, you know, between, you know, East-West traffic, right? And looking at all those different aspects is, you know, what we do. Stu and I were at Oracle Open World. Larry Ellison was forcefully saying, you got to push security down to the lowest part of the stack. And they're, you know, talking about the old sun acquisition, encryption on the chip, silicon. So, this is not new to Juniper, right? So, one, do you agree with that? And then what are you guys doing to talk about security vis-a-vis what is being promoted out there by the Larry Ellisons of the world who see security moving from application down to the lowest level? Yeah, well, you know, in reality, if you really want to be safe, you got to just go off the grain, right? I mean, security is really all about an ROI gain, right? It's an ROI gain for your intruders, essentially. They need the most cost-effective way to get into your network so they can extract the value out of the network. The more difficult you make it for them, the less enticing it is for them to infiltrate your network. So, you need security everywhere, absolutely, right? To what level and to what extent, right? That's where you really need to look at, you know, what is the most practical way? Because you can really go crazy. And this has, you know, been the long fight between, you know, CISOs and CIOs, right? But you need to have practical security policies that you can actually, you know, put into the network. And that's why we believe in the software-defined secure networks because you want to look at it from a business and a business risk perspective and be able to apply those policies. And then that policy can most cost-effectively decide where and when in the network do you apply a security? So, what you're saying, if I understand you correctly is, there's no really one answer. It's up and down the stack, pretty much. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it is up and down the stack. And you have to look at it from the perspective of, you know, what is best for your network and, you know, where is your biggest risks? So, Jennifer, earlier this year we read VMworld and seems security is really kind of the early killer use case that VMWare's seeing with NSX. VMWare's, it's both a partner, but you guys have your own SDN solution. We heard in the keynote this morning a lot of discussion about kind of the momentum and growth of the contrail. Can you kind of help, you know, unpack for us the SDN message? You guys were an early, you know, platinum sponsor, member of Open Daylight. I know you guys participate a little bit there, but it's really more about contrail and open contrail. So, you know, bring us up to speed on the SDN piece. Sure, yeah, so, you know, we have no religion, right? We support, you know, VMWare's NSX solution, as a matter of fact, with today's announcement. We're one of the most integrated vendors with VMWare. We've integrated with vCenter vSphere and also with VMWare's vRealizeOps. So from a network management perspective, we allow the bridging between physical and virtual. We also recognize that there are a lot of customers out there who want to build it themselves, right? And they're, they've really embraced OpenStack community or the Open Daylight community. And in OpenStack, right, you know, you may have seen the user survey, but contrail is the most adopted SDN controller from a commercial vendor perspective out there. And the reason is because we've really embraced the community to bring OpenStack, right, to the forefront. We've never been afraid to do things differently, right? We have contrail and we also have our open contrail solution that allows customers to choose whether they want to build it themselves or they want us to provide them with a package solution. But we know that customers want choice and they don't want to be locked in. And that's what we're trying to offer customers. So again, no religion. If customers want to use NSX, we'll support them with NSX. If they want to use and build themselves because of their requirements and OpenStack solution, we're happy to support that too. The cloud game certainly is changing the enterprise data center. What's your number one conversation or top three conversations you're having with customers and your product teams as you look at this transformation in the data center? Because now it's private, on-prem private cloud and public cloud and hybrid is the engineered solution in between both. Yeah. What's the top three conversations you're involved with? Definitely the first one, you know, as we've already talked a little bit about is how do I get started? Like what's the first step? And it's not the same for every customer, right? And that's why we have our professional services where we actually do data center assessments with them, right? Sometimes they need to start with their architecture. Some of them haven't even moved to virtualize. Some of them still have on-prem data centers and they haven't even started to think about, you know, building, you know, a private cloud. So it just depends. Some customers are ready to jump, you know, fullheartedly, honestly into public cloud solutions with a small on-prem data center. And for them, it's more about, well, what is the security I need to look at in terms of bridging and bursting into a public cloud? We actually, at AWS's re-invent conference, we're actually going to have VSRX now as a offering, a drop-down offering directly within AWS so that we're very, very excited about. But, you know, so that's another concern. So, you know, and then finally it's about automation and how to make this completely seamless and make it so that you have flexibility and choice because the next step really is to be able to choose which public cloud vendor to use, when and why, getting the best offering that customers can to burst. Maybe today I burst into Amazon, maybe another day I burst into Azure, right? I want to be able to have that flexibility of choice and know that I'm doing it with little risk to my organization and also optimize the use of my OpEx as much as possible. So we had a great chat with Gary Clark at AWS on theCUBE and he was really candid, but it was interesting what Amazon use case points out, is that it's a multi-platform integration game, it seems like. Yes, yes. So highlight what that means from an Amazon standpoint and use that as an example of, because there'll be other in clouds, other environments, and how does Juniper fit in there? Is that a core part of the going forward thesis for Juniper? Oh, absolutely. The difference between what Juniper says in terms of ecosystems and partners is we really put into play and execute on this openness, right? Everyone says they're open, but you can see the proof points with Juniper where we actually have integration in, for example, AWS. We actually have, we work with customers and partners to provide other customers, they're end customers, like AWS is end customers, the best solution possible. So your final question to end the segment. Share with the folks watching that aren't here, that are customers. What's going on at this event? It's a customer summit. What are some of the things that are being discussed? What's the vibe? What's the feeling? Because they're, I'm sure they have a little fear of missing out FOMO going on. So share with them what's happening. Sure, absolutely. So, you know, very exciting, a lot of buzz. Definitely at the top of mind, a lot of our customers is talking about SDN and NFV, how that actually is going to map into their networks and looking at the plan of evolution of most of our customers' networks. They're super excited, a lot around security also. And also, just around architectures, how do you architect for the future in terms of scale for growth, but not having to shell out exorbitant amounts of cash and working within your IT budgets, for example, to really be able to build networks of the future. The top trending hashtags here at this event for the folks watching is Instant Evolution, big NFV idea, Junos, Juniper, JNPR, Ambassadors. And I love Trio, I don't know how I love Trio that in there, is that something that's like, so that's really interesting, this evolution. You mentioned revolutionaries, is that the culture right now? Oh, absolutely, you know, and I love that, right? I mean, you were talking a little bit about, you know, our founder, Pradeep Sindhu, you know, still being a major driving force of this company, and you know, Rami Rahim, who is a longtime employee also, you know, we've never been afraid to do things differently, we've never been afraid to reinvent ourselves, you know, we see where the industry is going, and we're not afraid to go there. It's a great opportunity right now, and founder-led companies are the ones that always do great, and the ones, because they have that vision, they know where the North Star is, and then share some color with what Pradeep is pushing, and what are some of the things he's talking about? Well, I think the company strategy in general is one of a challenger spirit, if you will, right? Not afraid to challenge the status quo, not afraid to really do things differently, to lead the evolution of the industry, and to really bring that challenger mindset to everybody in the industry, while mitigating their risks, right? Because we know we all have to evolve, right? What's the saying, evolve or die, right? And so, we're not afraid to do that, and that's what you find here. And always getting out for that next wave, and what is that next wave at Juniper? Well, the next wave is really around automation, like we talked about, right? It's about removing the rogue mundane tasks out of the network, so that you can actually leverage your network into a powerful services platform of the future. Okay, Jennifer Blatnick with Juniper Networks, Vice President of Portfolio Marketing for Cloud, and Enterprise, thanks for joining us here in theCUBE. We'll be right back with more Juniper coverage of their customer summit here. Next work, NXT work is the hashtag. Join the conversation, go to crowdchat.net slash NXT work. We'll be taking questions, and that's where they're recording the Twitter conversations. We'll be right back with more after this short break.