 Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Juniper Nextwork 2016, brought to you by Juniper. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Silicon Valley for Nextwork, Network 2016 with Juniper Network's annual user conference. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Eric Fliegel, Vice President of Network Engineering, of WoW, exclamation point, which stands for Wilds. It was Wide Open West. Wide Open West, it's a cable provider, overbuilder, a lot of gear, a lot on Juniper. You're running a lot of traffic. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, appreciate it, thanks for having me. So, talk about the cable, I mean, talk about the business, what is WoW you guys doing? Just give a quick overview of the business that you're in, cable, obviously, and then footprint, gear, speeds, feeds, data flow. Yeah, sure, so WoW is a cable operator, mostly in the kind of Midwest and Southeast markets. I think we're in 12, 13 states with 19 markets throughout those states. For the most part, kind of your traditional cable operator, triple play, bundle, voice, video and data services, in addition to a significant focus on commercial services and growing that commercial space. And so, why are you here at this event, just at Juniper's event? We, as far as WoW goes, we're a pretty big customer from our network standpoint, use a lot of the core and access, and then specifically, right now for us, NFV is a big, big focus area for us and virtualization of the network in general, kind of what that means and where we can kind of push that and leverage that too, in many ways. We had Rami on earlier, the CEO, Juniper, Stu asked him about the NFV question, essentially said, I'm paraphrasing. We're betting the ranch on NFV, you didn't say that, but that's my interpretation, but he's bullish on it. He's seen things in the next 18 months and that he's going to hit his stride. Your thoughts on that, how you guys see that working? I would agree, I think it's finally starting to get some legs and competitors of ours, including us, we're finally starting to get some things in play, being able to provide real services to customers across the platform. And I think the most exciting thing about it is there's a lot of possibilities, right? We have a lot we can do with it and some of which I don't even think we know yet. Eric, we talked to some of the telcos, some of your competitors out there and those first NFV solutions, you're walking over a lot of glass to make them happen. It's kind of a challenging out there, but starting to bear fruit, is that kind of your experience and what do you say? Definitely the case, I mean, we kind of went into it. Being, I would say, not the largest operators in the world, we had to pick some areas of focus for us. So we picked some specific services that we're going after that we're building towards to focus on around managed services and things like that, that we're looking to grow our services and grow our platform. And initially it wasn't easy. It's taken a lot of work by a dedicated, passionate team on our side that have worked really hard to get there, has not been easy, to be honest. And we have had to go through quite a few, and then quite a few speed bumps along the way, but we're getting there. So you guys worked with the cloud CPE, Metroniper, you share any color on that product and the virtual cloud thing? Yeah, so specifically for us, we're utilizing CSO, Contrail Service Orchestration and Contrail to deliver NFV services. We're also interested in their NFX platform for similar type of services, but on customer prem. Very honestly for us, right now the focus is to reduce the equipment on the customer prem, just from an operational perspective, less truck rolls, less equipment to fail, all those sorts of things. We're trying to do it kind of in our head ends and our hub sites and our data centers to provide those services. That's the truck roll, it's an economic impact to your business. Absolutely, absolutely. On the profitability. Technically, you're going to replace CPE or on-prem device and put it in the network, or how does that work? We will always have something, well, I don't want to say always, we will have some sort of DMARC device. The idea is to make that cost as low as possible. So really strip the intelligence out of that, put the intelligence in the cloud, kind of, so to speak, and then keep that device as really a DMARC from a test and validation. A philosophical question that everyone's asking themselves. We go to a lot of these events and it's a great question because everyone has a different answer. I'll ask you the same question. How are you looking at the network differently? Because you have existing network, obviously core and Juniper all everywhere. But as you look at the future, knowing what some of the economic issues are, you mentioned on-prem devices, truck rolls, that's kind of pretty obvious. But what are the things that you guys see that makes the network look differently to you guys as you shape it forward in the future? I think it's just the continued evolution of convergence. I mean, we've seen it in optical and network layers and that's continuing to move and now we're seeing it in kind of compute and network and cloud. And in such a way that I foresee us getting to the point where the network is just a bunch of compute. So a place where we have purpose-built hardware, purpose-built proprietary hardware in many cases to deliver the services as a cable operator we have to provide, it's just going to become almost commodity compute with the intelligence and the software running on top of it. And then from a transition standpoint, it's been a big, it's a big transition from a people standpoint, right? And that's an area of focus for us on trying to also shift the expertise and the talent of our workforce. I'm just curious, what are some of the things you've seen in the customer base that have been new trends lately? As you see, I've all the triple-play stuff, is there more internet, more cord cutting, you're seeing behaviors? What trends do you see if you connect with dots? Yeah, I mean, obviously cord cutting is what everyone's talking about. For us as a cable operator moving away from traditional linear video, that's something that we understand as a cable operator and know what's going to happen. In fact, we embrace it and are working on new products and services that help a customer take advantage of a lot of the over-the-top streaming services that are out there in a unified search approach and things like that to actually make that easier. When you say linear TV, what do you mean by that? Just broadcast, television. Scheduled, eight o'clock, the show's on. Absolutely live television, right? Yeah. Asynchronous, nonlinear consumption. Exactly. Can I get a cue, what do we do? Exactly. Who gets a cue over the top? Totally secure here at Juniper Networks. What's the coolest thing that you're working on right now? I mean, I honestly think this is it. From an NFV standpoint, I'm really excited about it. I get, my colleagues will tell you, I get worked up about it, get pretty passionate about it, excited about the future and what it means for us and the industry as a whole. I think it's one of the biggest changes from a network perspective that we've seen in quite a while. What are people missing about NFV? I see, first of all, I run into two types of people. Yeah, NFV's going to be awesome. Ah, NFV, that dog doesn't hunt. There's really two camps out there right now, and I'm oversimplifying, but generally speaking. So maybe the dogma of whatever religion they're from and politically and technically in the network view. But what are they missing with NFV? I'm hearing more people say, NFV is happening. It's going to be big. What are the folks missing out there that they may not be seeing? Is it technology? Is it just application? Is it learning? Is it training? I think the key to it is really people. I mean, to be honest, it's a shift in thinking of the traditional network engineer, the traditional folks that you'll have designing and building networks and it's shifting to very software-centric developer model kind of services in a way that a lot of the big web content guys are already driving. They're thinking about this new kind of content type, right? So they're kind of thinking of the new outside the box or outside the network kind of thinking. It is, and then obviously the hardware component is coming down in price, it's a significant factor. Eric, security's been really the top issue discussed here at the show. What do you think about what you've heard here from Juniper and how's that fitting into the solutions you guys are building? No, I think it's great specifically, as I said, we're going to be deploying the VSRX for our managed security offering. In addition to, we're excited about the CSRX containerized version of that. We're looking forward to kind of getting working on that. But it's a service that custom, obviously, as we talked about earlier in the show here, there's no lack of need for security for customers and especially businesses and... Eric, would love to hear how kind of that virtualization containers discussions, playing out in your environment. Our technical teams would probably love to have the conversation, in some cases, a bit of a religious debate, probably. But we're proponents of containerization and would love to kind of continue that. Okay, final question. Juniper, going in the right direction, your opinion? I definitely think so. Software is a focus. I think you see it across a lot of the vendors now and one reason I've been kind of proponent of Juniper is because, at least in my opinion, they've been on that path for a while and are one of the, kind of, had been leading the way in many cases. Software is where the future is, I think, and they're doing a great job of it. Well, the founder has been talking about software going back to, I remember, 2008. Absolutely. I mean, they really, I mean, they might have kind of tacked a few times, but now they seem to be in a nice track relative to the value of NFV and software base, but they've had this software mindset for a while. Yeah, absolutely. I think, and like you said, I think they have had a couple, there's been some points in their history where they've maybe gotten off track a little bit, but I would say I think they're hitting their stride a little bit and doing well. All right, Eric Weigel, vice president of network engineering from WoW, big cable operator. Thanks for sharing your insights. NFV, it's here, it's happening. Going down in price and again, over the top, new content and linear cable and struggling, dead as we would say, but over the top is where the action is. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here. Absolutely. We'll keep you right back with more in Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman after this short break. I remember when I had such a fantastic.