 Live from Santa Clara, California, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering next work, 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 at the Santa Clara Marriott, right in the shadows of Levi's stage where we will adjourn for an evening reception for Juniper Network's special next work, NXT work. That's the hashtag in their event is next work, 2015. It's their first customer summit. This is theCUBE's special presentation of live wall-to-wall coverage all day. 13 interviews and wrap up here to end the event. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Valley. I'm Joe Miniman, the analyst at Wikibon.com, covering infrastructure and cloud. And of course, Brian Gracie's back at the ranch. His cohort really blending in, Stu, the convergence of cloud meets infrastructure and the Juniper story here at their customers event. Some announcements, just the hard news right off the top is the disaggregation of Junos. Really talking about white boxes, tuning the infrastructure, separating hardware and software. That's counter to some of the things we heard at Oracle. Strategic, this is for telcos, this is for innovative companies who want full control of the network to create an innovation strategy in the enterprise. Really, really key. New pricing, cloud, CPE, putting the customer premise equipment in the cloud, having rapid innovation and agility there. Obviously, contrail, a big part of the story here, Stu. And of course, the God Boxes, I always like to call it, the QFX 5200. It's called on Twitter, a monster, a beast, metafabric, all this modernization happening with Juniper. This is a big deal. Management flexing their muscles, Stu. Really bold moves, opening things up, taking a different approach, putting it out there. What's your take? Yeah, John, it's been a real good event. First of all, love the focus on the customers, getting them direct access to the executives and the technical sessions. One of our guests on said, the sessions are really kind of nerdy, and that's good, we like that. That's why the customers that have loved Junos for years, they said, one of the customers on here said, best CLI in the industry, and I love what they're doing, and they listen to me, and they give me the tools that I need, and I've got programmability and flexibility, and good focus on automation and software. The keynotes this morning, John, hit all the big questions that I'd have, and we've been talking for a few years now. Customers want networking to really turn into kind of a software ecosystem, and rather than looking at, I'm buying boxes and I'm buying capital expenses, I need to transfer that to more of an operational expenses to really fit that cloud model more. And Juniper, of course, has strong strength in the carriers and the service riders and those are the ones that are ready to move to this transition, and it's going to trickle down over time to the enterprises who are either going to do some of it themselves or are going to turn to those service riders, telcos and the like, to get those services. So impressed with what I see today, there's some tough transitions, and Juniper's at least got the message down well. Yeah, and they've got a new management team, and they're not outsiders, they're industry vets, the founder's still around, Pradeep, the founder's not the CEO, that's still not a big deal, he's the wingman to the CEO, and it's fresh management, they're young, but they've been here 19 years, they know the DNA, they know the DNA of the culture, so that's super important. But still, I got to ask you, we've been looking at this market now for multiple, multiple years, the hyperscale, all this convergence happening, now you get cloud, the theme that we're hearing over and over again is self-preservation. People are going to go out of business, and that is really what we're hearing, if they don't evolve, they will die, and then we've been seeing this transition, so the low-hanging fruit are some of the telcos, and Juniper's had success there, so the operational business models are starting to come into focus. Those foundational set of services are laid down with cloud and on-prem, now we're seeing those foundational services, so I got to ask you, are we truly going to see this next break up, because the enterprise just doesn't seem to see the blowout that we've seen with the telcos, certainly on the Juniper side, so what's your take on that? Do you see Juniper really moving the ball down the field with contrail, with some of the enterprise requirements? Yeah, so John, one of the critiques that people have had about Juniper for years is they don't have a strong presence at the enterprise. Well, it's actually a strength for them now, because the service providers are the ones that are trying the new technologies and Juniper has solutions that fit what they need. So often we're chasing what the hyperscale guys are doing. Well, I'd love to see a little bit more insight as to where Juniper is selling solutions, what solutions they're selling, which of the big hyperscales they have environments in, because you're right, there's seismic shifts going on, and we heard VMware say, when AWS wins, we, the VMware ecosystem, all lose at Dell World. Michael Dell got on stage with Satya Nadella, and I kind of said after it, well, if Microsoft wins, Dell maybe loses a little bit less. They've got hardware in there, they've got a good partnership and can fill that hybrid message. And Juniper's hybrid message, I think holds some water. I like what they're saying. They've got kind of both ends of it. The cloud CPE message sounds pretty good. Moving to more of a software-based solution is the way to go and it's just going to take a while for this transition to happen because network change is slow and there's a lot of pieces in there. You mentioned some of the hardware pieces that were in there. Juniper's always had some good architecture, but even though I'm a hardware guy by background, it's been nice to really talk about where the software's going, how it fits into the cloud. The story fits together real nice. Stu, good point. I want to bring back up these foundational things that are now in place. Software is the key to the value proposition. Security obviously is being software-based. We've heard about deceptive tactics from one of their partners, this is interesting. But the theme that also in DevOps that's been out throughout the whole few years that we've been covering DevOps deeply is engineering. The word engineer is coming up more and more. There's some real engineering going on. So this aggregating out software hardware is very interesting. So I got to ask the question, do people want to engineer their own stuff and do people buy purpose-built Android? I don't say general purpose, but you know what I'm saying. You have high expertise, and then you have low expertise. So two ends of the spectrum. Are we seeing more and more enterprises, certainly we're seeing with telcos, have the kind of requisite expertise that they actually want to tune in with themselves, and certainly we've talked about in theCUBE. Hybrid Cloud is an engineering exercise. It's architecture, it's real build-out. Your thoughts? So John, first of all, when the whole software-defined meme started and how much of that's going to be programed out of, things that people need to program themselves, both Juniper and Arista have some good heritage there. They work with many of the kind of developer frameworks. They have APIs, they fit into these environments. And what we definitely hear is there's certain things that companies want to deal with and then things that they don't want to manage. So we give advice, John, to most practitioners, you don't want to build another data center unless that's really critical to your business. And talk about companies like DigitalOcean, we had Expedion on. There's reasons why obviously they're going to own their own environments. They're doing Colo, they're doing certain managed services, but otherwise you want to get out of that business. And even networking, if you talk about Contrail and some of the other SDN solutions, the kind of mid-market and SMB, those solutions really aren't that ready for you and you might want to go to an environment where they can not only host you from a physical standpoint, but they can take care of some of those advanced networking services, they can tie you into the public clouds and they can help you get rid of what we've always said, that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Because if it's not something that's critical to your business, that's something that you want to get rid of. Of course, security is critical to everybody, understanding and controlling my data sources are important. And network is the backbone and critical piece of your business, but who owns it and how they manage it needs to be sorted out by the companies. Stu I'm going to put you in the spot and I'll answer the same question myself. I'm really not putting myself in the spot because I already know the question before you get it. But what did you learn today? I mean, going in, you had some preconceived notions of what to expect. You followed, you covered Juniper as an analyst. We had a conversation, we had a pre-production meeting with our team of analysts at Wikibon. We had the huddle. We talked about the pros and cons of the opportunity for Juniper. After hearing the executives talk today, what did you learn? Yeah, so there's this weird thing, John. We knew coming in here when Juniper says, oh, 85% of our engineers work on software. That's not a surprise, but what is surprising to me is how they're bent in the farm on that, we're going to really, you can take our software and you can run on other hardware. I mean, the way the industry tracks success today has been how many boxes they sell, how many ports they ship, kind of the shifts in the market share like that. And I've talked to a few other networking companies that are saying, this is where we need to go, but Juniper is trying to be the flag bearer and say, this is the way we need things to go. And they believe that that gives them an advantage against the big dog, Cisco, because Cisco still sells a lot of hardware. Most of Cisco's gear is on their own shifts. And Juniper, they do a little bit of silicon and it is important, but they're going to give you options and choice. I want to make sure that Juniper is working directly with the customers as the segmentation that makes possible because no company can be all things to all people. But like what I heard, John, and some good announcements, customers are loving it. And yeah, it's a good message. Stu, what I learned was going in was, well, I learned a few things. One, I got validation around this engineering culture. And what I learned was it's a little bit deeper than I thought I knew was pretty geeky, pretty nerdy culture at Juniper, but they're not hiding it. They're getting down and dirty, we heard from customers. So from the top CEO and down, it's an engineering culture, but they're articulate and they have a good vision. So that one, that confirms that. And I like the mojo of the management. I think they got spring to their step. So I like that, that's been validated. The Juno's thing I learned is interesting. And what I learned there was is that, and created new insight for me, is that the approach to engineering out from what telcos are doing to what the enterprises are doing actually brings a plausible opportunity for really new types of engineering within the infrastructure that we've never seen before. So this whole open horizontally scalable separation layer between hardware and software really is super interesting. And I think that is something that's unique to Juniper. They have a unique perspective and the ecosystem can rally around that because that could be an opportunity for Juniper. So what I learned there was this disaggregation of Juno's could be a really strong bold move that could change the nature of how Juniper executes. Because what that will allow companies to do is really take advantage of the investment they have in their people. And engineer solutions, not just buy product. So this is a whole new normal. You either buy the product, works in the cloud with some integration going on with like an Oracle, or you engineer your own. But it's not a buy versus build in that capacity. It's a network infrastructure perspective of foundation. So that was really interesting. And then to the Juno thing, I'm just surprised at taking this long. I thought they could have done this earlier. And I think they probably realized that. So, great event. Stu, final thoughts? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. They come in here, John, and say they don't have religion. They're working closely with their customers. They still have a lot of partnerships. So, you know, they're working with IBM on some stuff. Contrail, of course, is a big push for the company. But, you know, if you want to do open daylight, there's still a silver member and that there's a little bit of participation there. And if you want to do VMware, you know, they say that they've got really tight integration with NSX. So, you know, Juniper fitting a lot of environments. And, you know, for the size company they are, I think there's a lot of opportunity. And it's been nice to see a company that has, you know, had just a good customer, you know, mojo going for years, that it seems the street is positive on the message. And, you know, looking forward to the evening event here to go mix and find out what everybody's been learning. We're heading to Levi's Stadium for the exclusive customer event here at Nextwork. Go check out crowdpages.co.nxtwork. That's a special social page we just created for all the content. All the videos are up there. What's trending in this community? Also, we have a social network that we put together as part of the Wikibon SiliconANGLE Cube team. That's our community, which we've sliced and diced that we're using big data. Check that out. And, of course, participate in the crowd chat. We're going to leave it open. And really exciting, and I think Juniper is on the right track. Stu, thanks for hosting with me today. This has been great. Guys, thanks for all your work. And stay tuned for our next Cube opportunity. Look, go to SiliconANGLE.tv to find out what's next for the Cube. A lot of stuff happening. Wherever we're trying to go, we're all the actions. And we will go to wherever the action is. So if you have action, we will bring the Cube to your place. Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for next time.