 from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here at Amazon re-invent 2015. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the event and extract the signal from the noise, breaking it down, getting down in dirty, getting under the hood, looking at the business benefits. We just taught an ecosystem. Now we're going to talk technology. We're here with Gary Clark, ITCTO, Corporate Vice President of Juniper Networks, reports to the CIO, not to be confused. You're a technical CIO-like type person. You're in the trenches, but you don't have any responsibility to manage the numbers, right? I'm very good, yeah exactly. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, good morning John. We're going to be at your event coming up, so we're looking forward to getting more data. New management team at Juniper, a lot of young technical executives, which I love, I've been a big fan of that. Product guys at the helm, always a winning formula in my mind. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in the network that's here, right? You guys are a huge player in that, so give us your take. What's your take as a network person? You're looking up the stack. There's always the danger to creep up the stack. Amazon's kind of doing that. Look at the whole stack. What's your take of this whole world? So yeah, at Juniper Networks, we're a very focused company. We're really focused around being network excellence and network innovation. And the good news as this internet thing, the big discussion this morning, Bert made a big announcement on it. Inevitably, eight-star growth, almost by definition. Our core mission initially was stated nearly 20 years ago, 17, 18 years ago now. Very important, connect everything, empower everyone. That model is even more current, is even more relevant today, I think. So you guys partner, also a partner and a customer of AWS. Yes. Talk about that. You're moving some of your IT stuff into Amazon. How is that changing your cloud relationship with the company? Just give us some insight into color, into that relationship. So like many IT groups, we're trying to move into the cloud progressively, where we're in excess of 85% on our journey. So from a corporate IT point of view, we're pretty significantly there, considering we're a traditional company, we've moved to the cloud, I think. Not born in the cloud, as many other newer companies are. However, we've made significant investments with Amazon, and I'm pleased to say they're a big customer of ours, we're now an emerging partner of theirs, and they're a great supplier to me. So I'm in this wonderful position where- So they're buying new routers in years? Yes, some of our kits, so it's pretty important to us, and they're driving our innovation as well to meet their ever-growing needs in the cloud, to provide services back to me. So it's almost an idyllic position for me to sit in. Yeah, you know, we're also a customer of Amazon. We use their stuff, cloud, for our crowd chat stuff, and so it's great, they're a great platform. So that kind of changed our media business a little bit, because we're a media company, we're not a cloud company, but the cloud is part of the future, right? So Juniper has been known as a box company, and so has Cisco and everybody else, but you certainly had software in your DNA, the founder is very software centric, has been for over a decade, pushing basically SDN, Junos and whatnot over the years, so Pradeep is a fantastic entrepreneur, a big fan. But how is the perception of Juniper changing with AWS? How is that changing? So I think if I stand back and look at Juniper's model, yes, for traditional box shifter, we focused a great deal on one axis, it was performance and scale. So if you want something fast in a core network, you need high performance data center products, you need embedded security, we work in all that space, and we are moving many of our products now to a virtual environment, so we have recently announced on some platforms the availability of virtual firewall, virtual SRX and virtual routers. So this enables that position that we saw a lot of companies in today, the hybrid cloud, just like my company is in today, invested heavily into running services in Amazon, but also heavily invested in a hybrid environment, which I see many of the corporations in, so that suits our needs. As a company's pivoting more towards software, then we need to move at that speed also, and Amazon's enabling our business to achieve that agility, particularly customer-facing. Well that's great stuff with Juniper, congratulations on all the integration, partner, customer of Amazon, it's fantastic. I'd like you to take your Juniper hat off for a second, put your IT CTO hat on, because it's really an interesting time right now, it's really, I mean, on one level intoxicating, the all the opportunity, the technology, it's super exciting. On the other hand, it's scary, crazy scary, it's Stu Miniman at Wikibon said, and David Floyd, one of our other analysts, I was on the first day, talking about the challenges of replatforming for big IT shops. Can you share some insight into that, because you're a technical CTO for IT, the levels of scale on transformation, I mean, some people would just wish they had a magic wand, say, okay, go to the cloud, I want the economics, I want the OpEx, you know, just genie in the bottle kind of thing, how hard is it to do that, transforming, replatforming the entire IT? Got it, so we started the journey of about three and a half years ago, laid down an architecture, as it happens, we started with the network first, it was interesting to hear the head of professional services yesterday for Amazon, indicating that a lot of people missed that first step, so his first box was, hey, key transformation architecture, I have to agree with him, I am an architect for my living. I'm with that foundation, you enable that cloud interconnect, so being smart around that development is pretty important, so set an architecture, move what you can to SaaS, of course, not everything's going to, no lower applications are going to be there, so we've been great, other great partners like Office 365, Salesforce.com, many other, again, customer-partner kind of relationships, so take some of the easy wins, and tackle some of the, and tackle the training very seriously, deep training, Amazon's been great there, we've worked with partners through cloud technology, partners as a partner, so we've leveraged, if you like, the new infrastructure, the new ecosystem that's coming up around Amazon. I tell you the most exciting thing, I think in this transformation, this technology thing, how hard is it? I think Amazon is making it easy, these announcements around Lambda, announcements around a serverless build, I can see this is going to be great for my data, data analytics, BI application areas, which I think clearly they're empowering, and other key steps they've made, they've configured their compute towards specific, like in-memory compute around HANA, very smart move, I think, on their part to get into that marketplace, so I think all these pieces have enabled us to have set an architecture, and then go to the market pretty aggressively, so we figure where I say 85% there, three years, I think another 18 months, we'll be grossly in the cloud. Yeah, I mean they also did, they were smart, they did building blocks. Yes. When I sat down with Andy Jassy, it was very clear, a few building blocks, and then they built up from there, and it really becomes an issue of easy, right? So like standing stuff up as a theme you hear with Amazon, standing stuff up easily and fast. Yes. Getting some value. Yes. But it sounds simple, but to your point, it's an architectural game. Right. And then construction, right, so. And I think Verna made a good point this morning, complex systems are born from simple ideas, and you expand upon those ideas, and that was his lecture, if you like, for the day. It was a total lecture, but I want his one comment that I tweeted, I want to get your take on this. Sure. Because I loved it, and I kind of hear what he's saying. He says, everyone knows how to build reliable systems. They just didn't have the hardware budget to do it. Yes. Basically what he was referring to is, we understand on the theory on a whiteboard, a lot of smart people, no architecture, can lay out the ideal reliable system. Yep. But then implementing it, it's like an idea, everyone's got the same idea, but execution is what makes the difference. Right. What is he talking about there when he says, reliable system, is he talking about the cloud as a lower cost structure, a more enabling technology, or the above? What's your take on that? So, if you take it to the building blocks, they've looked at the model very intelligently, about the idea of elasticity, to provide auto-scaling that nature. These are fundamental building blocks, which would be hard to achieve in previous processes. You'd ultimately scale out of some blocks, and you wouldn't be able to achieve that. So, they've unleashed that area. They've done global load balancing, gives you the high availability. These are these key things in transforming this high reliability. So, high availability is a key thing. Disaster recovers another key thing. These are natively built into the Amazon cloud. And I think this is how he says it can be made simpler. They have made it simpler because these are now on demand services. To construct that lot can be done at a, and it's not so much the price point, the complexity of it. They, in fact, made it simpler, I believe. Yeah, they've done a good job. Their integrated staff, their integrated mission is really to me, I think, what's going to look back on history. But I want to get your take on something that we use in car analogies all the time. Since BMW was on stage in their little connected car thing, good school. As geeks, we love the car, love the color red. Love that Ferrari. But under the hood, there's a lot of things going on. I want to, and you're involved in that with Juniper. There's a lot of stuff at the network level that a lot of people aren't seeing because they just like the car. They want to just drive around and have fun to do whatever their workloads are. So, okay, under the hood, what is the core innovation right now in the network? Amazon has guys working on the network. You got SDN, you got NFV, you got all the stuff going on, virtualization. Yeah. What's your take on all of this? So, it's pretty clear to me that complex networks, you have complex problems. So in that axis of scale out and scale up to the scale of the modern internet services or internet of things is a classic example. On the other axis, it's about performance and management. And it's about automation. It's automated or die. The complexity will consume us if we don't automate. And we saw more and more of those services. So, as the tech guy looking up the stack, I'm seeing this innovation very clearly happening. We're making significant investments in, we used to call it in-house, the big brain. What are we trying to achieve here? It's how the internet of network things is controlled and provides automation in automatic response to security events, to network congestion events, to quality of service alerts. That automation up this other axis is the turning point in the network. And we need it to achieve scale. Okay, so let's just say that we are in a new era where there's cars and ITs in the cloud. The old IT is the horse and buggy. Yes. So now everyone's got cars, roads got to be paved. You talk about skills and training. We got architecture, we have new construction for how to build out large scale, reliable systems, fully integrated stacks, all et cetera, et cetera. We love that. Training, what is the skill set? What are the skill gaps? What are the new guys that are going to be hanging the iron if you will, for this new construction? Architects have been laid out. Now they got to go execute. What is the core skill set? Interdisciplinary data science, all the stuff's going on. Yes. What's your take? I'm seeing a shortfall in our education system here in the U.S. Which is upsetting many of us in the industry and causing a lot of discussion. Just next week there's the Grace Hopper event around women in the industry. We'll be there live, by the way. Very good. I look forward to seeing you there again. We'll be supporting that as a Platinum supporter. Again, that's really about us trying to influence education to provide more of what we need in the industry. Yeah, diversity, STEM. Yes, exactly. Huge problem. STEM problem. And we're not seeing any fundamental change at this point. We're seeing people talking about it. We're trying to be active. We're a partner with some universities. We're a partner with colleges. And we're trying to do more to improve that space. And this is a big issue to me. We're very passionate on SiliconANG. We do our best to get the data out there and thank you for sharing your knowledge. But this is the issue for us. This, you can't hire enough people. I mean, you've got to talk up and down the stack. Data scientists down to SD and engineers. Yes. It's not enough people. No. So you need money. Hence the ecosystem conversation we just had. Yes, yes. Yeah, so education is a big thing and I trust there'll be some more folks on it in this coming year. Gary, thanks so much. The final point, I'll give you the final word. Yes. Share with the folks that are watching what's that aren't here at the event. I mean, it's kind of magical in a way. It's exciting, a lot of buzz. The real business is being done. What's the vibe of the show? What's going on here? What's the big story this year around Amazon web services? They're building, enabling us as customers of Amazon to build things faster, quicker for sure. And fundamentally cheaper because of the building block. So I think this, and the classic example today was this internet of things. This is a massive growing market. It's good for my company. It's good for the business. Good for everybody. It's good for everybody. More training's needed, all that stuff. Yes. And the automation that they've achieved in bringing service to the market is just outstanding. So the big thing around that is the ability which we can now move nearer to the internet of things speeds that's required to keep up with the market. Gary, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge here on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. You're watching SiliconANGLE.tv and we will be at the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing next week. I'll be there with Jeff Frick. We're going to be down there, our big stage. We're going to be having a ton of women in tech talking about the journey, the challenges, opportunities, great stuff. And you're watching SiliconANGLE.tv and we have every Wednesday, women in Wednesday, tech featured athlete on SiliconANGLE.tv. You're watching us live here now at Amazon re-invent. We'll be right back after this short break.