 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at AWS re-invent 2018 in Las Vegas. Day two of four days of coverage. I think we'll do 120 interviews. I mean, this is the most hoppin' show in tech right now. We're really excited to be here. And joined by my co-host Lauren Cooney, Lauren, great to see you. Thank you, great to see you too. We've got our next guest. It's Adisha Chopra. She's a senior manager, product line manager for Juniper Networks. Welcome. Thank you. Feels great to be here. So what do you think of this show? Have you been to a re-invent before? Oh my God, no, this is my first one. And I am so excited. It's the energy is so great. It's vibrant. I'm learning a lot. I'm very happy to be here. So Juniper's been around for a long time. Way predating this cloud, this whole cloud thing. So what are you guys up to? What's the latest and really why you're here at re-invent? What's your story at AWS? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think the latest thing with us is, as early as today there was a, we were posted on the AWS partner solution website. Vodafone is partnering with Juniper for their SD-WAN offering with, you know, the SD-WAN controller and sitting in AWS, managing all their branch offices. So that's what's the newest with us. And, you know, we've been making waves with a lot of partnerships recently. Couple of months ago or maybe just a month ago we announced with Nutanix. So that, you know, that announcement was focused more for our enterprise customers. Integration with Nutanix is a hyper-converged infrastructure where Juniper will be, you know, an integral part of their networking, providing for their conversion infrastructure. And then before that, I think a few months ago we had Red Hat. We announced a partnership with Red Hat. And, you know, that's focused on our telco cloud. So as you were mentioning, Juniper's been around for a long time. And, you know, telco clouds are strong, sweet telcos. Now, telco cloud, right? And similarly for enterprise. If you think about it, you know, large enterprises and telcos are not that different, right? So that's where we were at. And that's the more kind of, we're following the evolution like our customers are, right? They used to be telco, now they're telco cloud. Juniper, I think the newest thing with Juniper, to be honest, in technology I spoke about partnerships, but it's our cloud first strategy. That's what we have in mind. We are evolving with our customers, helping them in their journey for cloud adoption, cloud migration, right? It's a couple of sentences to say that, oh, we're helping our customers with cloud migration. But we're, you know, there's so many steps in between. They're very complex. You need a lot of hand holding and we are right there for our customers. So what does that actually mean? When you are, you know, saying that you're helping your customers, are they, are you working with them to bring them multi-cloud solutions from AWS and Microsoft and Google or? Correct, exactly. Can you give me a scenario or a use case? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what, like I was saying traditionally, Juniper was, you know, a hardware focused company. So our existing customer base, they bought a lot of big heavy boxes from us. And of course on top of it, came a world-class routing and switching software component, right, and it was all bundled up and sold together. Now, with, you know, they're moving towards the cloud, towards AWS, towards GCP, towards Azure. We want to be able to provide to them and who better to provide this service to them. We understand they're on-prem network. We understand cloud networking. We understand the transport in between. So what we're doing is, for our customers, we manage their existing on-prem networks, which, you know, a lot of our customers, you know, they're huge and they have a significant amount of footprints, global footprint, right? So we understand that we were able to connect them to the AWS, to the GCP, to the Azure, right? And the value proposition for them is that if they wanted to do it themselves, they have to understand, you know, three different or five different clouds, right? You have IBM, you have digital ocean. There's a lot out there, right? And getting the OPEX or getting the talent to be able to understand all these things and do the migration, it's hard, right? This is a complex problem to solve. So what Juniper brings to the table is we abstract it out. So, for example, I wanted to... Well, I just want to say, you know, one of the things that you're talking about here, and this is a total switch, if I'm right, is are you becoming a managed service provider? We do have a managed service provider. Because it sounds like you're going to be putting a lot more money into that side of the business versus the straight up product side of the business. Yeah, yeah, that's where we are pivoting from, you know, we want to, our perception used to be that we are a hardware company. Now we are a cloud-first company. We are a software company. So we're definitely pivoting towards the software-based solutions, software-based offerings. It's like your iPhone, right? Or your phone. You buy the hardware, but you're really buying it for the iOS or for the applications that run on it. Networking is following a similar paradigm now, right? It's the hardware boxes. They're definitely our bread and butter still. But it's the software now that's enabling and giving it all the cool factor and the innovation that's happening. It's all in the software. Contrail, that's our story for multi-cloud. That's one of our product offerings. So what Contrail does is, and I think that's what I was kind of referring to earlier, it gives you that higher level of abstraction where you don't have to worry about, am I, is my workload running in AWS? Is my workload running in GCP? It doesn't matter, right? You, as an enterprise or as a telco, we want you to focus on powering your applications, powering your services. We don't want you to worry about your infrastructure. That's our job, right? We want to completely hide all the complexity away from you and just let you do what, generate revenue. So as an application developer, right? So I'm an application developer and I use Azure, for example, right? And that's kind of my platform and I'm doing some interesting stuff with some scripting or I'm building, just a general new website or something like that with a couple different things. So as a developer at that level, I don't even know about Contrail. Exactly, exactly. Exactly, but I don't think Contrail yet extends up to that layer where it can manage everything across multiple clouds. So it provides you as a developer, like you said, you're writing an application, you don't care about the infrastructure, it's just there, right? And we want to keep it that way. Contrail is there, Contrail is at that level. Contrail is going to provide the plumbing. So you as a developer, today everything, all developers are moving towards containers, right? So for example, the Red Hat partnership that I brought up earlier, that's focused on their Red Hat OpenShift platforms, their PADS service, which is a container-based service. Contrail integrates with Kubernetes. We integrate with Mesos, we integrate with Docker. So as a developer, when you employ these tools to write your code using a CI CD platform, Contrail is sitting right under it, giving you that connectivity. So for example, when you're developing your application and you deploy it, you deploy part of it in Azure, you deploy part of it in AWS, right? And you don't care where it goes. You use one for like bursting or something like that. Exactly, yeah, yeah. The rest of it on-prem. Correct. You know, it's distributed, right? So who's going to plumb it and make sure that it's giving you the results that you need? That's where Contrail comes in. Gives you that plumbing between on-prem, between AWS. So how is that different from Kubernetes as a whole? Like I know that it's, you know, it does like container management, orchestration, deployment, delivery. How does Contrail kind of come in and work with Kubernetes? So great question, by the way. You know your stuff. So Kubernetes is orchestration for your workloads, right? It's services. Kubernetes provides a service, like it gives you a service whip. You deploy a bunch of Kubernetes minions, they all work together to give you that application that you need. Now what Contrail does is it provides the networking between those Kubernetes pods. So let's say you want to scale up your application. Okay, you had 10 pods, now you want to go to 20. Kubernetes makes that decision for you that you need the 20 pods. And then Contrail is sitting under it, giving you the networking for those 20 pods. So when those 20 pods spin up, Kubernetes folks Contrail and says, hey, 20 more and these need to talk to those 10 pods that were already there, right? So Contrail is open source, right? Correct. Why haven't you donated it yet to the CNCF? We are part of CNCF. I know that. But fundamentally, if you want that to be pulled as much as you do, it's already open source. You might as well kind of get on that thread with the Kubernetes folks and start talking to them about how you make it part of the core distribution that then goes into six different distros. But something along those lines versus don't start your own distro, right? Don't start your own distro. But look at how you can become integrated into that Kubernetes stream that they stream. Exactly. Yeah, that is definitely something that, like you're saying, it's something that we want to do. That's the direction that we want to go at. But I think the actual decision is maybe above my pay grade. So I don't want to make a commitment here. So, you know. You sure want to follow up on slightly different track when you talk about cloud first and you answer the question, which is when you say cloud first, is that kind of the way you're going to market with your customers? Or is that the way you guys are looking at Juniper in terms of transforming the company? And it sounds like you said it's more of the latter really starting to reformulate Juniper as a cloud first. So how is that transformation going inside the company? That's a pretty significant shift from selling boxes and maintenance agreements and shipping metals. Yeah, we are definitely modernizing from within, right? But a lot of it is driven by our customers. Like I was saying, you know, they are evolving. They want to connect to the cloud. And you know, we obviously want to help them do that. As part of that, we want to be microservices based, right? Because we want to be able to support containers. These are just things that, you know, we need to do. Juniper is a leader as far as, you know, innovation in networking is concerned. So it was never a question of if we want to do this or if we want to go down this path or not, right? It's when, right? And we are definitely working day in and day out to make that happen. So, you know, a lot of our offerings, like recently we came out with our containerized SRX solution. SRX is our full feature, full service, next generation firewall. And we have containerized it, right? I believe it's the first offering of its kind. Containerized, host based firewalls. So, you know, innovative stuff happening all the time. Like you said, you know, it's definitely a herculean task but we are up for it and we're doing it. And I'm just curious when the customer conversations, you know, the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, public cloud conversation, right? There's a lot of conversations. How do you take your customers down the path? Where do you see them, you know, trying to navigate and it's going to be a pretty complex world for a CIO trying to figure out what they're supposed to buy and not buy it, how to pay attention. Can I hit all the boosts? Right, right. You're at AWS in three days, I don't think so. I know, yeah. These conversations to be honest have been going on for the past couple of years, right? A lot of our customers, the intent is there to move to the cloud. And you know, we are trying to help them with it. So we, you know, we design with them. We design their network. We design their topologies. We handhold them, telling them how to do this, right? They're existing networks that they have. The complexity comes in because everything, like think of a company, right, a large company, it then goes ahead and acquires 10 more and they all have their own networks. They all have their own environments. VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix. So different kinds of environments now all need to connect to the cloud. You don't want them to be siloed. You also don't want to deal with, you know, all those different kinds of, like I was saying, you know, skillset to be able to connect them all individually. So when we talk to our customers, that's what we tell them that, you know, with a Juniper-based solution, we have so many of them that work together in a cohesive way to give you that end-to-end connectivity. Secure automated multi-cloud, that's our mantra, right? And as far as, you know, engineering is concerned, engineering simplicity. If you come down to Juniper, it's plastered all over the walls, right? Engineering simplicity. We were really driving that message internally so that, and a lot of the CICD stuff, right? The way we want our customers to use it is how we're using it, so that, you know, that improves our quality, that improves reliability, and all those things. So in terms of hand-holding our customers, we talk, you know, we're there on the table day one. We talk to them about their design. I see that a lot of our customers currently where they're at is they are trying to connect to the cloud. They all want to move towards the containerized services. They know that's the right thing to do. They're not quite there yet, right? The intent is definitely there. They're playing with it, but in terms of being in production, we're still, you know, a little bit off. Not too much, but we'll get there soon, right? So we talk to them, we talk about, you know, how they can make their applications cloud-ready. There's a couple of ways to do it. You lift and shift, or, you know, directly move to go cloud-native. We have all these discussions with them. What fits their bill, right? What is good for them? What is it that's going to work for them? And then, you know, of course the connectivity piece, right? But with it, security, reliability, and scale, right? A company like Juniper, obviously, you know, Innovator and Networking, we solve problems for at a different level, right? For our much larger customers. So we talk to them about scale. We talk to them about, you know, reliable security is huge, right? You have a workload that you spun up on-prem. And then now, you know, you have, your requirements have changed. You're going to have to replicate it, say, in AWS. When you replicate it, you still want the same security that you had on-prem to apply to this workload, which is now going to be in AWS. How do you do that? It's easy, with contrary, right? Because it's intent-driven. You specify the intent, in fact, you specified the intent when you brought up the first workload, and it captured it, okay, I'm supposed to talk to, you know, say, I'm workload-red, and I can only talk to other red workloads, and I cannot talk to the blue workload, something like that, right? So you specify the intent, and then when that red workload now comes up in AWS, it already knows that I wasn't supposed to talk to the green workload, so that policy and all the intent moves with that workload. And this is all done through contrary, right? And the other thing, that single pane of glass, I'm sure you've heard about it a lot today, right? The single pane of glass, you specify it one time. Again, the abstraction away from all those, you know, five clouds that you're working with, you specify the red workload, the policy for the red workload one time, and then it doesn't matter where you bring it up. Contrail will automatically apply it everywhere, and, you know, it's good to go. That's great. Well, Disha, thanks for coming. I certainly got the energy to attack this big problem, so I hope the universe is fortunate to have you. Thanks for coming on and sharing this story. Great, thank you for having me. It was wonderful talking to you guys. All right, Disha, Lauren, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS ReInvent 2018. Come on down, we're in the main expo hall right by the center. Thanks for watching.