 from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Hello everyone, you are watching theCUBE and we are live at Nutanix.next here in Anaheim. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We're joined by Michael Bouchon. He is the Vice President Enterprise Marketing at Juniper Networks. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE, you're a CUBE alum. So thank you, this is awesome. And you can't see it on the cameras, but this is a just amazing experience. We are in the clouds up here. It's a very high stage. Everything's coming full circle. It's like Jim Kramer-esque a little bit. Very, oh, absolutely. Of course, we're going to ask the tough questions. What's going on? And he's going to start slamming everything very soon. Well, Michael, we've known each other for a long time. Juniper going back, wait. When, 10 years ago, SiliconANGLE started, we're in our 10th year. You've seen the journey, you've been with Juniper, you've left Juniper to startup, brocade, then back to Juniper. So you've seen that circle. You've seen the couple waves. I mean, one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera was, saw network fabrics, Juniper had Junos, and then VMware bought Nacera, which became the SDN wave, our now self-defined data center. So you've been in that journey as a product person and now marketing Juniper. It's actually going back about a decade, this whole SDN stuff networking. So what's the role now that you're doing? What's Juniper doing? Why Nutanix? What's your story here? Sure. So I run enterprise marketing at Juniper. So my goal is effectively to make some of the hype make sense, right? It goes back a decade, actually the early days of the old SDN movement, we didn't call it SDN, right? Juniper started with OpenFlow and PCE and Alto and all these acronyms. And we actually, we're a great engineering company, maybe a not so great marketing company and we actually used to call it network programmability. That didn't take off, but the technology's kind of endured. And I think what we saw was this lengthy incubation period to the point that now as we sit here at Dotnext in 2019, we're starting to see now some of the traction over the last couple of years. And so Juniper's general position, we want to drive adoption. Certainly there's products and technology that underpins that, but fundamentally we're looking at a huge operational shift and if that operational shift doesn't happen, then that's to the detriment of everyone in the industry. What's the relationship with Nutanix? Can you talk about how you guys work together? What's the connection? Sure. So Nutanix obviously does the whole hyper-converged space. We provide the networking components to that. So whether that's the top of rack connectivity, how do you get your traffic into the rest of the network? We've done some security stuff which we can talk more about. And then if you look at the overall management piece, we've got integrations at the management and policy layer as well. So your relationship, you both got a very similar world view of how you see technology. You're both taken on VMware too. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship there and why it works? Sure. Fundamentally, if you look at what Nutanix is trying to do, it's this whole idea of one-clicketizing everything. They talk a lot in their keynote sessions. You hear the executives talk. You look at the collateral, the messages they take to customers. It's about making things simple. Juniper's strategy is this idea of engineering simplicity. So just at a top level, like what's our purpose, what's our role in this industry at large? I think we have a very common world view. Of course, driving simplicity is going to happen in the context of real architectural change. And the change that's kind of everywhere is cloud and increasingly multi-cloud. And so both Nutanix and Juniper are about really driving simplicity in the context of cloud and multi-cloud, giving customers the opportunity to run workloads wherever they need to without taking on additional operational burden that's kind of unnecessary and unwanted in enterprise networking. So the big trend is multi-cloud. You guys, that's a key part of the strategy. Dave Vellante and I and Stu Miniman were arguing on theCUBE a couple of events ago. They're in one of our sessions about the hype around multi-cloud, the reality of it. The reality is that everyone kind of has multiple clouds. The clouds aren't necessarily talking to each other and then we were just kind of riffing on, the cloud is just one big distributed network. Distributed computing, distributed networks. These aren't new paradigms. These are existing things that have computer science behind them, engineering behind it. So Juniper, you guys have been around for a long time connecting networks. The cloud is like similar to the same construct. On-premise hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, it's basically a distributed network. It's all cloud operations, we get that. But the technology issue is not that hard. I won't say not that hard, but it's similar to what you guys have done in the past just differently. How are you guys looking at that? Because multiple clouds is like internet working. I mean, switch is routed. You move from packet to point A, point B, you get storage, you get store stuff. So concepts are all the same. How are you guys seeing the multi-cloud opportunity within Juniper? Sure, so I would make the distinction between multiple clouds and multi-cloud. I agree with you. If you look at most enterprises, they have a workload in Amazon. They're using Salesforce, and so they're multi-cloud, right? They have multiple clouds. Multi-cloud is more of an operational condition. It's about taking disparate pools of resources and managing that as one thing. So think of it more about how you do stuff and less about where you host an application. If you look at even describing Amazon, some people will say, well, Amazon is just, cloud is just using other people's servers. It's not, you're not renting their servers. What you're leveraging is their operations. That's the transformation that's kind of underfoot. And so while some of the technology bits are common, the ability to do abstracted control, moving to declarative or intent-based management, right? These are the right technology building blocks. What you're seeing now is the operational models are coming along. And that's really, that's the change we have to drive. And I'll just kind of close with, when you change technology, if it's just about deploying a piece of software, if it's just about deploying a piece of hardware, like candidly, the challenge isn't that, it's not that hard, right? We know how to deploy stuff. When you start talking about changing how people fundamentally do their jobs, when you start talking about changing how businesses operate, that's the piece that takes some time. And I would venture, that's why, you look at a decade ago, where we started, if you look at why it's taken a decade, it's the operational change, not the technology piece. And the cultural DevOps movement, certainly forcing function on that, which is awesome. It's a tailwind, I think. And again, Gene Kim was on yesterday, who wrote the DevOps handbook, and also does the DevOps Enterprise Summit, said we're 3% in. I would agree with him, I think it's about so early. But the challenge I want to get your thoughts, Michael, on this is that connecting multiple and disparate environments is great, but latency kills now. So now latency, these are old school concepts. You got time, can't change the laws of physics, right? So latency is matters, SLA's matters. So these are network challenges, these are software challenges. What's your view on that piece of the puzzle? Well, even when we say cloud, a lot of people probably think GCP, Azure, they might think AWS, you're probably a picture in your head, some logically central cloud. First, we need to disavow people of the notion that cloud is this thing that somehow sits at the center of everything. It's not. There are centralized clouds. If you're optimizing for economics, it makes perfect sense to do that. There's distributed clouds. The whole rise of multi-axis edge computing is about changing the paradigm from moving data to the application, right? If your application's in Amazon and you're going to send your data there, that's one model. So sometimes you might want to move the application to the data. If you have a lot of data, like an IoT use case as an example, I always use oil platforms as a really good example. I don't know if you know, but do you know how they get all their, they have all these mining and manufacturing bits. They've got lots of data. How do they get that data off the oil platforms? Snowball? So what they do is the helicopters come in, they take the drives off and they leave, right? The reason they do that is because if you're reliant on satellite links, it's just too much data. You can't saturate the link. It's cheaper to get a helicopter to rent a helicopter to come in. Well, and then when they're swapping the crew out every 14 days, that's what happens. So here's the thing, right? If in that kind of model, then the cloud, the data center exists on premises. And if that's the case, then when we think about kind of what the cloud is, the cloud is, it's a lot more than what most of us probably think about. Certainly we see it with outposts as AWS is starting to move to on-premises versions. And there's a lot of reasons you might want to have a distributed cloud. Certainly it could be your comfort and security and control. There's real privacy implications, country of origin. So subpoenas can access your information depending on where it resides. What you're saying is basically it's all cloud. It's operational is the new definition. So if you take it from an operational standpoint, you got ops and devs, and that's it. The rest is just all connected somehow through the tech. And then you need to have, yeah. So we understand the connectivity, bitch. You've got to have the right elements. But if it's operational, it's about how do you do policy management? So part of the whole Nutanix thing and kind of what drove us together was this idea that if I want to one click everything, if you can do that within the hyperconverged space, you still have to do that over the connected environment, which means managing policy from a single location regardless of where it is. And of course using that policy to drive security. And their strategy is to take what worked for HCI and the data center, move that into this new operating model which spans multiple, quote, disparate environments or clouds or edges. A similar concept, but different environmental, or, you know. That's exactly right. And so then what Nutanix needs then is a strong networking partner because they have to, they do the bits that they do. They need other people to do the bits that we can do. We pull those things together and then you can provide essentially a secure environment for hybrid workloads. So you guys embedded it into their products? You guys joined CEL together? Is it more of a partnership? How deep is the partnership with Nutanix? So I'll just say, I'll say yes. We, you know, all of these are great. So at kind of the most surface level, you know, you need to have top of rack switches. You got to connect to the network. And so we do qualification there. So if you deploy Nutanix, you can deploy Juniper alongside. And that looks more like kind of a co-selling meet-in-the-channel type model. Beyond that, if you look at how we provide security over like a workload environment, the question is then, you know, what's the security element? So we've taken our virtual firewall. We call our VSRX, which essentially runs into VM and we can run that on AHV. And so that gives them a segmentation strategy. So if you look at workloads that are distributed across a cluster by having a firewall element, then we can enforce policy. Of course, that firewall element is then integrated with Prism. So if I want to deploy these things, when I spin up a new VM, what I want to do is spin up the security with it. And so you see management integration. And then if we continue this to its kind of full conclusion, we have a product suite we call Contrail in the enterprise version, Contrail Enterprise Multi-Cloud, which is all about policy management and underlay management. And so as we extend the partnership, it gives us additional opportunity to take, to provide routed elements, which provide, you know, policy enforcement points and then to give us a way of managing policy over a diverse environment. And you guys can bring in that platform element for Nutanix. Is there now a platform? They have a full stack of software only. So you guys, you can take their stuff and put it there and vice versa. That's exactly right. So whether the workload resides in AWS on EC2 or whether it resides kind of on-premises in AHV, we can, one, we're kind of co-managed. And then two, it gives us the security elements to play across that. One of the things that we're talking a lot about at this conference and at a lot of other events like it is sort of more the dark side of technology. We're at a time where major presidential candidates are talking about breaking up big tech. We're becoming much more aware of the privacy concerns, the biases that are built into algorithms. Exactly. I want to hear your thoughts as a technology veteran. Are you still a technology optimist or do you, does this stuff keep you up at night? I mean, how? Where do you fit your personal views? I would say I'm somewhat of a technology optimist, but I'm a skeptic when it comes to the people. I think if the technology existed in a vacuum, I think some of the problems go away. I think privacy is a major concern. I think it's going to shape regulatory action, especially in Europe. I think we'll see similar actions in the US. I don't have quite a strong connection to what's happening in Asia. I think that the regulatory, the challenge I have from a technology perspective is that if the regulations come in the absence of understanding how the technology works, then you end up with some really terrifying outcomes. And so I'm a fan of the technology. I'm nervous of the people. And then in terms of our overall role as companies here, I think we need to do a candidly, a better job of making sure things land before we move on to the next big thing. And we're talking cloud, we're 10 years into cloud and people are always talking about the next frontier. To some extent, I think the world doesn't move as fast as we like to think it does. I don't think that the, even like the market, I'm in a marketing role. I don't think that the marketing hype necessarily, I don't think it serves us by moving too far ahead because I will tell you when the gap between the promise and the reality becomes insurmountably wide, I think it's a, I think everyone loses. And you run the risk of stranding an entire generation of people who get stuck behind. And I don't, I'm nervous about what that means. And I think it's, you asked the question that you're the dark side. I think it's certainly, it plays out in our industry. I think it plays out, there's a digital divide that's growing in the US based on broadband access. By the way, that's going to widen with 5G. I think it plays out between different nation states. So I, yeah, I'm, I don't know if I'm an optimist. Maybe I'm a pragmatist. Yeah, realist. Yeah. I'm a little scared. Well, cloud definitely happened. I mean, that's a good point. And we took a lot of heat at SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, theCUBE. Stu Miniman and the team put out the first private cloud report. People like, this is nonsense. Well, and our thesis was, cloud's great. If you want, if you're in the cloud as a cloud native or, you know, new startup, why wouldn't you go on Amazon? I mean, everyone, we did that. But if, once you taste cloud operations, you go, wow, this is so much awesome, right? Yeah. Then go into a modern enterprise, it's not going to be overnight changeover. I mean, that we- Some might say it's going to take about a decade. We felt from the beginning that cloud operations, once you taste cloud, you realize this is a new operating model. There's a lot of benefits to that, but to change it over in the enterprise, and that turned out to be what everyone's now doing. That was three years ago. Well, there's implications. So if it's operations, then operations is inherently an end-to-end proposition. You can't have operations in a silo, things like your monitoring tools. How do you do cloud monitoring and on-premises monitoring? How do you do workflow execution? How do you do automation, whether that's event-driven or even just scripted? If you have wildly different environments that require you to bifurcate your IT investment, then there's a complexity that comes with that. Your people have to do more than one thing. That's hard. There's a cost that comes with that, because you have different teams for different things. There's a lack of coordination. I don't think you unlock the value of cloud in that environment, and so I think that operational piece is really around converging on a set of things. And Michael, your point about people and technology is so right on, we see that all the time, where I'm a technology optimist. I love technology, but I totally agree that people can really destroy it. I mean, look at fake news. It's just, you know, it's infrastructure, network effect, with bad content policy, because Facebook's a media company, not a platform. Well, technology's only as good as it's for you. And our people who run the government don't even know how the internet works. So, you know, when you go to the cloud, same thing. Technologists also want the government to come away with that. Look, the government just doesn't know how the internet works. Some people that do, but look at the hearings. It's ridiculous. But, you know, there's some real DoD projects going on. Future of the military, Jedi conflict, what I've been reporting on, where modern data-driven application workloads could use a sole cloud or multi-cloud. So, the dogma of what multi-vendor was in the old days is changing. I don't, I actually don't. So, if you look at multi-cloud, if it's an end-to-end proposition, then by definition, it's also going to be multi-vendor. Like, there's no future where it's like end-to-end all one vendor. I think we have to come to grips with that as an industry. But I think if you're clinging to your, you know, kind of, I want my single procurement vehicle. I want my single certification, by the way. I think if you believe fundamentally that incumbency is going to be your path forward, I think it's a dangerous place to be. It's not to say that I think the incumbents all go away, I don't. There's a heavy role to play, but certainly we're going to open things up. You think procurement's modernized? I mean, government goes back to 1995 procurement standards, but even in the enterprise, procurement's moving so, the tech's moving so fast, procurement still has rules from... So, no, I don't think all procurement is modernized. That's a whole other segment, right? I mean, there's a whole, I mean, procurement in our industry is driven by RFPs. RFPs tend to be derivative. I take my last RFP, I add some new lines. If you want SDN, so you take the, copy and paste 574 lines, add the 575th line SDN, you're going to end up in the same solution because the first 574 are the same. I do think we should learn a little bit from what the big public cloud companies are doing, which is, you know, tightening refresh cycles, retiring things with as much passion as they introduce new things, tightening up ultimately what gets deployed, maintaining diversity of underlying components so that you can maintain economic leverage when you're doing procurement, but then solidifying on an operationally streamlined model, that's, I think that's the future. That's certainly what we've bet on as a company. I think that's what we're betting on with Nutanix from a partnership point of view. I think we'll be on the right side of change on that. And I think it's going to, it may take some time to play out, but that's where I think things go. Great. Well, Michael Bouchon, always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE.