 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 Santa Clara in the shadow of Levi's Stadium for theCUBE's special presentation of Juniper's customer conference and event and customer summit networks and XT work is the hashtag. Go to crowdchat.net slash nxtwork. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, Joe Minico, Stu Miniman, our next guest, Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM of the Juniper Development Innovation. Welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. It's great to be here. You guys had a great run. I was at an event you guys had in March, a small event, a little bit smaller than this, but still the vibe was, wow, a lot of the development guys have been promoted to the management, young team, spring in the step, a lot of mojo coming out of Juniper, really some good momentum. So give us a quick update on what's happened since March, what's some company momentum, what's hot, what's trending. And then the customer event. What's happening here? What are some of the conversations? Absolutely, so you were at the March event and in March we unleashed a whole new set of products and innovations from routing, switching, security and SDN. And I can tell you that it has resonated with our customers dramatically. We've been able to go out and in this last quarter, which we just announced our numbers in Q3, we had tremendous growth year over year for two quarters in a row in security. We also saw 30% growth year over year from a switching perspective. And so the products and innovations that are been announced in March and are continuing to go out into the marketplace are being widely accepted by our customers. We like to think of the way we build products as co-innovating and when you're doing that and you're working closely with market leading customers, you're bound to get it right as long as you're listening and building to what your customers actually demand. And pivoting to what we're doing here today, this is our inaugural event for our customers. And it really is exciting to be here with market leading customers. And as one of the presenters said this morning, if you added up all of the market cap of the people who are here in this room, that's $5.7 trillion worth of customers. You can't add the government agencies because that's unlimited amounts of money. But if you think about just the customers themselves, it's really phenomenal to get all these people together in one place. I'd like you to talk about the mega trend happening right now. We've been talking about this on theCUBE. This is, we go to all the events, we talk to all the companies, all the thought leaders, all the customers and entrepreneurs. But the end of the client server era is pretty much kind of here. I mean, to me, the Dell acquisition of EMC or not yet closed, but $67 billion, really to me marks the end of that chapter. Not that it's going away. The next evolution on top of it is happening. That's cloud, data center, integration, dev ops, whatever people want to call it. But this is the big sea change. It is causing massive amounts of opportunity growth, wealth creation for companies, but also customers are transforming up and down. So is it Juniper's strategy to be that enabling platform? Because we're hearing orchestration, automation and openness. That kind of implies an enabling platform. Could you share your vision on what that enabling Juniper platform is? Absolutely. Fundamentally, we believe that we are in the business of connectivity, network services and application services. And the way that we have taken these things to market in the past has been through our hardware platforms. But the market has changed and no longer wants or needs a hardware software to be so tightly coupled to each other. They expect it to be disaggregated. And really, it all comes down to speed and agility. Our customers are hiring a lot of software developers in their operations departments. They're expecting that their own teams aren't just going and configuring things anymore, but actually be able to operate in the network in a scalable way. So if they see a problem, they solve the problem through automation and then they never see that problem again. Even if the problem still might pop up every once in a while. And our platform is certainly our software, which has been Juno's back since we shipped our first product in 1998. But that is changing and transforming and evolving into a platform that is going to be available on x86 on third-party silicon as well as on our own silicon. Not only that, but we're moving up the software stack as well. We did that first three years ago almost when we acquired Contrail into having an SDN controller. And then having our own open stack distribution. And now today with Contrail service orchestration, we're able to complete workflow automation for connectivity services. So if you want to go deploy a device out of a customer premise and you want to add new services to it, this takes months anymore, it takes minutes. And that's the speed of business that people are expecting today. Is that the DevOps layer? Is that the idea of infrastructure as code? Infrastructure as code, everything is software. Even the way that we're building our products is transforming. The way that we built Junos 18 years ago and the way that we're building Junos today and the way that we see it evolving over the next six, 12, 18 months, it's going to constantly evolve and change to make every single developer more productive than they have been even six or 12 months ago. It's an amazing transformation that's happening and we're excited to be part of it. So Jonathan, in your keynote this morning, you talked about the fact that while Juniper is already a software company, it's not yet running a software business. And even went a little further and said, you don't want to think of Junos as an operating system, but it's really about services that you're offering, network services, security services. Those are big changes. Not just, it's one thing to give customers a new architecture and say, how do I deploy this? But you've got customer budget, you've got the way the industry tracks you. Massive shifts to allow to have this happen. How do we get from where we are today to, I like the vision, but it's a lot of challenges to get there. How do you see us getting there as an industry and especially from a customer standpoint? This is why I was using the analogy of the egg, that it doesn't appear is that anything's happening inside of that egg, but that chicken is growing. It's becoming a chicken and it's going to pop out and that might look like a transformative experience, but it's just one more step in the evolution of that chicken becoming what it's going to be. Now, from Juniper's perspective, of course there's a technological innovation and transformation that has to happen and we've been well on our way in that for over three years now. Next is the business model transformation, which is going to happen over time as well, where you take these hundred different network and security services and applications that have quite frankly been locked inside of Junos for the past 18 years and making them available to our customers. And one example of that, if you look at IPS functionality, that's available inside of Junos today. If you go look at a Delaware report for standalone IPSs, we're not even on that report, but we have a carrier class scalable great IPS product that just happens to be inside of Junos, but our customers want to be able to deploy that not just on Junos hardware or Juniper hardware, but on any hardware so they can scale out their designs. And so there's a technology shift to enable that, but then there's a business shift to where a customer, whether they want to use perpetual licensing or subscription based licensing or some other mechanism that we enable them to do that. All right, you also laid out a disaggregation index. I thought it was an interesting way to look at the market. You know, as I've tracked the market the last couple of years, plenty of customers, they kind of tried the white box thing and most of the customers I talked to kind of failed and ran away from it. Some of the big companies out there, if you look at what HP and Dell are doing, they did what you call partial disaggregation or most of us call it more of like a bright box. So, you know, I give you a platform, I give you some choice on the operating system and they give you the warm hug of the services. The warm hug of the services, I think is critically important and I worry if you give customers too many choices, they'll be like, I don't know, I need your guidance, I need your help, we're talking to Digital Ocean. I mean, they love your CLI, they love the support they get from you guys. How do you reconcile that giving this broad options? Where do you really see most of the customers today and how do we work through this change? Well, it comes down to what I describe as real choice. And the two examples you gave, the vendor has the choice of what operating system you get to pick from. Real choice means that the customer is making that decision, but as you point out, going and having a completely disaggregated solution does require a different level of investment from a customer perspective. If I want to be able to move from operating system or application vendor A to application vendor B, the impetus is on the customer to be the integrator, which is a challenge. And this is why we stuck our toe in the water a year ago when we launched the OCX-1100, which I think the industry would classify as a bright box. And we found that some of our customers, some of them wanted to take it a step further and take it across our entire portfolio, which is what we announced today with the QFX 5200. You still, there's a set of customers that expect that full surround of professional services and we're ready to deliver that ourselves as well as with our partners. So I hear what you're saying, but if I look from a network engineering standpoint, there's no such thing as removing a bottleneck from a system. You're just moving to the other bottleneck in the system. I think there's a corollary on that. There's no such thing as removing complexity from a system. Somebody has to do this testing. And it's great to say that you've got big choices, but you can't support everything out there. I mean, it's pretty standard to say, okay, I'm going to support the market leaders from a cloud standpoint. You guys have a partnership with AWS. It's not every cloud immediately. So how do you balance that kind of flexibility yet reliability and make sure you can test it, support it? And the network has to run. It can't fall down on me or, we're all out of job and probably out of business. Right. Well, the network is in a unique position in that you really notice it when it's not working. And there's the comical meme that has passed around where you see Maslow's hierarchy of needs and somebody drew at the bottom a Wi-Fi. They came up last night by the way. Puts that out a bunch by the way. There's some element of truth in that is that we expect it to be there just like air or water. And certain classes of customers, they have their own integration teams. In fact, some of our customers have more software developers than we do. And in that instances, they have a different level of expectation than a customer who only has five people on their IT staff. So if you have five people on your IT staff, the concept of disaggregation might not be as important to you because you want that full level of surround. You want to make sure you've got a five, nine deployments. You want to make sure you have 24 by seven supports and two hour sparing in case anything happens to go wrong. But you also want to have a vision for the future that you don't want to necessarily be locked in. So if the industry does continue to evolve three, four, five years from now, well that physical equipment might still be there. You may want to be able to offer new applications and services that reside on it. So even though you may not do completely disaggregation today, the peace of mind that you get, knowing that Juniper is committed to that path, I think gives them additional opportunities whether they take advantage of it today or three years from now. So let's just unpack that that's a really great point because what you're saying if I hear you correctly is there are customers that just want turnkey. They don't, their investment in IT or network staff is a function of the consequences that they value out of it. Okay, I could be down for two hours and something's going to fix. Someone throws a switch, the network's back up and running. You mentioned Wi-Fi, that came up yesterday at Sports Data SV, we had an event. And I asked the CIO of the Giants, the Sharks, all the sports teams, if Wi-Fi is horrible, people are pissed. So that's a fan experience. But you take the network experience, same thing. The bigger the company, the bigger the investment in network, the bigger the consequences or bigger the opportunity. So that's, did I get that right? So what that means, your strategy is to use disaggregation to offer those customers ability to tune and offer custom solutions. So I get that. Is there an opportunity in your mind for this other market as a channel opportunity? We heard, you know, Digital Ocean. Is that where the gap will be filled? Do you see that market being more of an indirect opportunity for you guys? So the majority of our business is done through our channel partners. And the, that is certainly going to continue. Whether it be a valid added reseller or through a true multi-geography systems integrator, they each have different sets of capabilities. And our belief is that we can make sure that all of these components seamlessly fit together. And we're going to make sure that they do turnkey work. However, if a customer wants to go and develop their own set of applications or if a system integrator, who actually in many cases also a software development shop wants to build their own applications, whether it be for telemetry or advanced analytics, and they want to put that directly onto our platform as an additional network service, they should be able to do that. And they should be able to do that without having to ask us permission to do it because of all the infrastructure work that we've done to make the platform even more open than it has been. Now, if you go all the way back to the early, early days of Juniper, we actually had companies who built applications on our platform over 15 years ago and then built billion-dollar businesses reselling our hardware with their software on top of it. I don't think many other vendors can say 15 years ago that they had that functionality. We've just extended it even further. That's a great example. So let's give me an use case. So let's take the example where people want to disaggregate. Because there are people out there saying, hey, engineered systems from the database down to the silicon, we're hearing that story, which sounds like a purpose-built box versus the open model. What's the typical use case that you can share for that high-end or that customer? And then what's the use case? Can you give an example of the ones that they're getting the turnkey solution? Sure, I think one of the things that comes down to this, you made a point about being okay with a two-hour downtime. I don't think anybody's okay with a two-hour downtime. But I do think that there are customers who own their applications and there are customers who buy their applications. And for the customers who own their applications, they can put their resiliency in the application. And so that opens up a whole new way of how they can build out their data center infrastructure. For those customers who buy their applications, which is the predominant form and the enterprise, the applications typically are not resilient or redundant. It's the same thing with network infrastructure. Now, how you build that network infrastructure often comes down to how the applications were built to handle the infrastructure. Do they expect infrastructure to always be available? Or are they okay if a rack of equipment goes down? Does the application take a beating or not? Now, when you look at it from that perspective, that transformative event and just that single, do I own my apps or not, transforms every single element of how networks are built. And it's the same thing with disaggregation. If I control my application, then I may be more willing to go down a disaggregated path because I have different expectations for uptime in the network infrastructure. So Jonathan, when you talk to service providers, they can't have a complex environment. We talk about adding a rack, adding switches. You guys have a great heritage there, but can you talk about how with the cloud CPE, you're trying to drive that down market into kind of the enterprise and the commercial space because while the service providers are also pretty good at doing programmability and they love using the tools that you have, the enterprise a lot of times, they're not as savvy. They don't have the skill set. So maybe you can do a little compare contrast for us and how we bring that simplicity down, but it is a different market. Oh, completely. You could think of this as disaggregation of the customer premise equipment where one vendor has had a very tight hold with over 80% market share for nearly 30 years now and having one piece of hardware where only one vendor's applications can work on it, that's data centers of 1992, right? It just doesn't make sense anymore. That's not how our customers want to operate. So having a network and security services platform that can sit out at the customer premises in effect really extending your data center out to the customer premises is where our customers want to go. And what you mean is you're dramatically lowering the OPEX that our customers are facing, which is the biggest part of what they do at the same time dramatically increasing their agility. So if you want to put Cisco's router on a box and Fortinet's firewall and Juniper's NAT service, that's now possible to you and we want to make sure that this disaggregation that we've been talking about predominantly in the data center for the past few minutes directly applies to the simplification and disaggregation that's happening at the customer premises and that space, just like think of VMware circa eight or nine years ago, we think that same transformation is going to happen in the customer premises dramatically over the next two to three years. So can you talk a little bit about the operational change that happens in the customer environment? Cause even if you talk about certain environments, do I do it myself for, say I go to the public cloud, just operationally that's very different. I hear the same thing if I've got a, you know, CCIE's on my staff versus going to this new model, you know, that's tough, that's scary, that's, you know, it different, you know, change is tough, you know, how do you help with that? The biggest change that I view this as, is not just a technical conversation, but it's really a moral problem. And there are some companies have done a very good job of this. I was talking to a customer just a few weeks ago where almost three years ago, they wrote up a new job description for their operations team and they said, here are the skills that are required and you have three years to get these skills and we're going to pay for your training, we're going to have in-house training, we're going to send you to training, we're going to make sure you can go to, where do you need to get these skills? But you've got three years and we want you to get there but also realizing that maybe not everybody's going to be able to get there, to have those skills because change is scary, you know, you think about the book Who Moved My Cheese, it's a transformative event for some and some can make it. But from a customer perspective, I order a service from AT&T or I'm going to go have my own service where I manage this customer prem. In the past, think about it, I had to worry about high availability, I had to worry about which device was my router chained to my voice box, was it chained to my went up optimization, was it changed to my firewall appropriately? Oh no, the firewall needs to go in front of the went up optimization, not behind the went up optimization, we cabled it up wrong, somebody needs to go back and refix everything. Think about being able to do that in a drag and drop fashion. These kind of things and you really can't get it wrong because it's done in software, the tool will prevent you from making the wrong mistakes and then you publish and if in fact you make a mistake, you change it in software and you republish it back out again. Yeah, you bring a great point, when I talk to most network engineers, it's you build the network and then don't change it, don't even breathe on it. You know, I don't want to change the firmware, I don't want to do that. My friends in the security space, they're like, the worst thing you can do is not update and change and get to the newest fixes because you have to get there from a security standpoint. Do you see us changing? What will the network look like and will we get to a point that it's more like, even on-prem, like the cloud where when I use Azure, I don't know what version I'm on, I'm on the latest one, they take care of that. Exactly, we absolutely need to get there as an industry so that you don't worry about software versions and in fact, you shouldn't even worry about the capabilities of the infrastructure. The infrastructure should tell you what services are available and if you want a firewall service, but let's say you've got a five-year-old CPE, you shouldn't say you can't have that service, it'll just simply deploy that firewall service for you in the cloud instead of putting it on that CPE equipment. So instead of having a network engineer go into a survey of 1,000 different sites with 50 different types of hardware, the network should be able to provide you that level of data and the tool should abstract it so that I say I just want this level of service and just deploy it in these 1,000 sites, whether it's in the cloud or on the customer premise, I really don't care. John, I'm going to talk about the event here. First of all, thank you for taking the time to come on, share your insights and data here on theCUBE, appreciate it. This event here, for the customers that are watching, didn't make it or couldn't send someone. What's going on here? What are you guys doing? What's the agenda? What's the message? What are some of the sessions you're having? Can you share some color around the actual physical event here, what's happening in the hallways and the sessions? And there's certainly the event tonight. Well, I mean, there's lots of energy. I think people are very excited about going over to Levi's Stadium tonight. One of the big things we want to make sure that everybody understands where we are. We were founded as a challenger. There were lots of networking startups back in 1996, if you recall back in the day. Very few of them have survived for very, very small periods of time. And that challenger view of the world is embedded into everything that we do. And I was at Cisco for 15 years. I was there a long time. I enjoyed my time there. It's a very good company. There's good years too. Right? But going from there to here, one of the biggest dramatic things that I found was that that challenger mindset was alive and well and kicking. And the passion that every single person has for innovating, working closely with our customers, I think of it as being unmatched for people I talk to in other parts of the industry. And that's what gets me excited about coming in. You know, here we want to make sure that that passion that we have for building the great products is well understood. That people know that we're going to continue to innovate and challenge the status quo in routing, switching security. And they get access to you guys. You have a very intimate environment here. It's very small. The beauty of it, I think, is we wanted to start in an intimate environment. We wanted to start with this inaugural event where we could have conversations in the hallway. I mean, I've presented at many other events, very large. The mega events. It's really that kind of stale, boring. It's very difficult to go have conversations with people one on one and really get to know where we're heading, where they're heading, and then how these two things can come together. And plus, you guys love the interaction because the market's changing. So I'm sure you guys got your notebook out, snapping some new lines out, new territory, looking at some product upgrades. Can you share any things that you're kind of teasing out concept-wise here? What's the big topic that you're sharing? There are people who are here, and I have to go to them and say, you remember the conversation that we had 15 months ago, but this particular topic? I remember that conversation. Well, we just launched that product, right? And we've been talking to you about it since then. Your input mattered, yeah. But want to let you know that you directly influence what it is that we're building. And oftentimes you're like, well, I know that I talked to you about it, but not realizing the impact that they have on the organization. So as an industry guru, expert now, executive here at Juniper, you've been around the cycles of innovation, certainly, the rocket ship that was Cisco, and then the challenger Juniper, but still challenger back then, still your leader now. But it's a new Juniper. But if you look at the industry today, the consolidation, Dell buying EMC, Larry Ellison's still at Oracle. You see the founder-led companies are really in charge now, and they're doing the good moves as the founders are still here. Pradeep is here still. What's it like working for a founder-led company now? And they're only a handful left that are, I call the hall of fame, execs in the computer industry. Pradeep is one of them. I have to say, one of the best parts of my job is being able to meet with Pradeep several times a week and just talk about products, talk about strategy, talk about what the industry's going. Being able to have somebody who's so brilliant and thinks so far out in time and is right most of the time is a true pleasure. And quite frankly, for those of you who haven't worked closely with them, you probably don't know this. But generally when you're brilliant, you're not humble. And some of the people you rattled off kind of fit in that category. Pradeep is not only brilliant, but he's humble at the same time. And he's able to pull people together to get the best out of everybody who works with him. And these new ways of innovation can really sink a boat with not founder-led, in my opinion. We're seeing great success. So congratulations. Thanks for sharing the insight job that Dave's EVP general manager here at Juniper Networks Development and Innovation. Here, it's innovation on theCUBE, sharing the data with you for special CUBE presentation at the Juniper Customer Summit here in Santa Clara. In the shadow of Levi Stadium, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we'll be right back with more CUBE coverage after this short break.