 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. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley in the shadow of Levi Stadium here at Santa Clara, Marriott for a special CUBE presentation of Nextwork Juniper's Customer Summit. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angel and Stu Miniman. And we're an analyst at wikibond.com and this is our flagship program theCUBE where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Our next guest is Jason Grass, Intervision Systems President and Co-Founder. Welcome to theCUBE. Great, thank you. So you guys are a big partner at Juniper. You've been in the integration business for many decades. If you're the founder, congratulations. Local, Santa Clara, so that's awesome. You guys have interesting perspective because you're on the front lines. You deal with customers and you live and die by them writing the checks to do good work and having profitability. So my first question is, in the sea change that you're experiencing right now, we're seeing the end of the client server era but those solutions aren't being ripped and replaced. They're being extended to the cloud and all kinds of new stuff in the data center. So first question is, what's your take on this transformation from a customer standpoint? Are they wanting more packet solutions? How's the economics? Is business good? Share some perspective. Well, obviously the market is changing and it's not just an overnight change. It's more of an evolution versus a revolution. So I think we're seeing a bit of a transformation of where things are going, although maybe the client server business is kind of diminishing. There's a lot of opportunities to take advantage of hybrid cloud, cloud models, in various different capacity requirements that's going on in the marketplace. And yeah, you're right. We've been doing this a long time. We've been business 23 years in the Silicon Valley. I founded Intervision along with another guy back in the early 90s and we've been a Juniper partner since 1999, almost the inception of Juniper. But I remember back in the days when things first started, you were literally routing on a sun workstation, right? So there has been a transformation and they'll continue to be transformations. And the nice thing about being in the channel is you can really take advantage of a lot of different opportunities and it's not necessarily tied to vendor technology. So you can really work on, as trends go, we can move with the trends. Talk about the J-Stack and why did you guys build that solution? We built the J-Stack because there's really a requirement out of the marketplace now to have reference design architectures, validated design architectures. It kind of was brought to bear with EMC and NetApp and some of the consortiums they had with Juniper's competitors and VMware. VCE? VCE, FlexPod. We were an early adopter of FlexPod and we became very successful with that. We recognized the opportunity that the marketplace needed for a converged infrastructure design that was repeatable and could be validated and could be supported. And so Intervision decided to create its own, sat on the Juniper Advisory Council. We talked about it a lot as a community with Juniper and Juniper has chosen to go to the market with their channel partners to build these versus going to market with a strategic alliance like a VCE-type opportunity. So, Jason, there was an announcement here at the show that you guys were involved in. Can you really unpack for us the metafabric architecture? What does that mean? How does it relate to the J-Stack that you guys have had for a while? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, really the concept of a virtual chassis, of a single pane of managing, a whole environment as it's one switch and then behind it, the actual fabric itself really gives you a lot of flexibility because of the spine-leaf technology to be able to scale out and create kind of a horizontal scale of the whole converged infrastructure, which really is a fabric, a compute layer and a storage backend. Okay, and what options are available from the compute and the storage standpoint? Well, the way that we've built it with Juniper, there's a multitude of options. We've validated and tested it with most of Dell's server lines, HP server lines, including there's some ability to do it with their blade server technology. Theoretically, it could probably be built with UCS as well, although we haven't tested that extensively, but there's a lot of different flexibility and options and I think that solution fits nicely for the customer that does not want to be pigeonholed into single vendor solutions or single alliance solutions where you have limited choices. So it just gives the customer a lot of flexibility in the way that they're able to build out their infrastructure and make changes along the way. One of the things about disaggregation that's interesting is that for the high-end customers, it's phenomenal. I can decouple the hardware software of a software-centric view from security, network, all that great stuff. But then you start getting into, I won't say SMB, it's kind of an overused term, but customers that want turnkey, hardened solutions, well, they're all hardened, but like you know what I'm saying, turnkey, that's where the partners, you guys can come in on the integration side where you've got building blocks. You don't want to, there may be some tuning behind the scenes but to the customer, it's a product, right? So talk about that dynamic because that's an opportunity potentially for the channel partners and the integrators because you can have a core competency and roll it out as a product, someone who's not staffed up with a zillion network guys. Talk about that dynamic. Is it an opportunity and how do you see that? Yeah, I think it's a tremendous opportunity for channel partners like Intervision because essentially you're able to marry those different technologies together, okay? And you don't have the same limitations that you do as single vendors. So if you're Juniper, yeah, you make great switches, routers and security appliances and now layers of software and the decoupling but you're still not addressing the compute layer, you're still not addressing the storage layer, right? So I think the channel community that can get this right, you're actually create more stickiness and value to the customer. So I think it gives us opportunities to go in and really drive it. What really, I think, is the underlying value of what customers want out of technology partners in general, which is they really want to solve business needs and we're just enabling them to solve those business needs through the use of technology. So I think more decoupling, less ability of tie, strict hardware and software, I think that's a good thing. There's been many opportunities over the years where best and breed, open source, things that have really allowed the market to evolve and I think at the end of the day, it gives the customers more flexibility to build what they want to build, not what a particular vendor thinks they should build. Talk about the SDDC, Self-Defined Data Center and Hybrid Club, what's your prediction in that market? Well, it's funny that you should say that because we actually, about a year ago, started kind of branding what we're doing out in the marketplace based on SDDC and depending on who you talk to, I think VMware originally coined the term, but it's kind of evolved into, I think the all-encompassing converged architecture of what's essentially the data center along with the orchestration tools and everything that allows you to do provisioning and throttle back and forth with private and hybrid clouds, I think there's a huge opportunity. It's multi-billion, I think at one point I've seen it as high as a $40 billion opportunity right now. So I think if you can build solutions to address an SDDC-enabled environment, I think that's really what customers want to hear now, is SDDC a product in itself? No, it's more of a conceptual way of going out in the marketplace at this point. What's the management platform you guys use? I mean, obviously you have to deal with multi-vendor. Yeah. So management's a big issue. Talk about the management side of it, the tooling and the platforms, what's the preferred choice for you guys? Well, if you look at what's going on with management tools and orchestration tools, I mean, it's still really being driven by the layer above the hardware and virtualization and VMware and OpenStack. And then tools on top of that, like we're working with a cloud provisioning tool company, it's a startup called ITAP that allows you to provision back and forth from, such as AWS. So, and then you go a bit of like storage back in, like our initial JStack and a lot of our testing was centered around CDOT with Network Appliance NetApp. And they have their own management tools. So I think there's a certain extent where we're still kind of held in the particular technology's management tools, but they're starting to become some really exciting tools out there that are sitting on top of that that are allowing you to do more provisioning, more allocation. And I think those are really going to enable kind of to see the full SDEC kind of concept and model come together. And that's really what we're trying to do is take advantage of that. But there isn't like a one size fits all with currently with management tools. Jason, if we look at a lot of the conversion, even the hyper-converged environments, it tends to be heavily storage driven. What opportunity do you see to kind of enhance the networking side of kind of the conversion, hyper-converged environments? Well, I mean, obviously with the stuff that Juniper's doing with MetaFabric, that gives you a lot of flexibility with scale out, right? So if you take a step back and you say, okay, the traditional way that it's been a reference architecture, validated design architecture, like an EMC or like a NetApp, they have driven that into the marketplace and they've created an opportunity that I think limits yourself to you have particular technologies and you can build out and continue to stack on those technologies. But I think what Juniper's trying to do is decouple that and make it more flexible because they're choosing not to really go to market with a particular storage manufacturer in the back end. I think their opportunity is really to be everything other than those. And there's a lot of workload type scenarios where I think the customer is looking to have that flexibility and not looking to have an architecture driven from a storage back end perspective, along with a certain select amount of vendors. Now the flip side of that is there is some validation with what certain types of customers want, sometimes in regulatory issues, banking, healthcare, where there's some level of comfort to have more of that validated design and less of kind of the open decoupling. So I think there's opportunities for everybody but I think Juniper has a particular grid solution and the type of announcements they're making lends itself towards success in that area. So I think that they continue to build on that and leverage their channel partners and leverage their customers and drive this into the market. I think they're going to see some success in that area. The other area I'm curious about is how much is kind of the public cloud fitting into the conversations that you're having and do you see an opportunity for the channel to be able to offer both sides of the hybrid solution? Yeah, I think obviously the public clouds fitting into a huge piece of the conversation with all of the customers. So I think the opportunity really is to build hybrid clouds and management tools that allow you to manage your public cloud and also manage your private cloud and bring those together to create hybrid clouds. And I think that's truly where we see the direction of SDDC and what the customers are looking for. Jason, thanks for coming by and sharing your insight with theCUBE. Congratulations on your success. Quick question for you at the end of the segment to give you the last word. What's the future for you guys? I mean, obviously all this changes opportunity. Give us a quick peek into the future vision for you guys. Well, I think we're going to continue down what we talked about today. You're going to see more and more hybrid type cloud. And I think that if intervision in the ecosystem are successful, we'll continue to build on a continued spend in this area and it's only up and to the right. Technology is not slowing down and I think there is a tremendous opportunity for everybody to share in that growth over the next 10 years. Rising tide floats all both ecosystems. The key to success in Open. This is theCUBE. We're open. We're sharing that data with you. We'll be right back with more after this short break live in Silicon Valley for Juniper's network customer summit. We'll be right back.