There has been a great deal of announcements from Juniper regarding its strategy and product ranges in the last few months. How big is this time in terms of milestones for the company?
I would say this is probably after the founding of the company 12 years ago this is the biggest announcement ever since.
And it is a reactive move perhaps to the call, globally, for cloud computing to become a stronger part of the overall business and networking provisions today…
Yes, we believe that networks overall are changing, it is about access and about the user experience and it is about overall virtualisation of everything for enterprises. We don’t believe that it is scalable for business to continue to build their dedicated data centres and this is why we believe that on the whole virtualisation is going to be very important and this is why we call it cloud networking rather than cloud computing. I think it is much bigger than just the computing part.
And you claim you can really save money for the end-user in both CAPEX and in OPEX. This is a claim though, that many vendors have been making as it is obviously what the end-user wants to hear right now. So why and how is your claim different? Is it down to the flexibility of the cloud?
It is that element for sure, because you start to share resources, applications and application providers in their shared space and you don’t need all of the IT resources for assistance and maintenance.
And the other thing that I really believe is important is — how are you going to scale this massive ramp-up? We have shown you what happened with all the devices that there are now, it will break, if a company and search providers are not starting to think more strategically about the future, it will break. It is not for us, just announcing one product, it is about software, it is about network architecture, and scalability. It is also about how to do things differently than we have done before.
This is also you laying down the gauntlet to Cisco as it faces increasing competition from all sides. How will your ‘New Network’ strategy help you challenge Cisco here on a local basis?
In most of the markets we have become either the number one or the number two player. That is definitely one of the things, we have been very successful in competing with them in the high performance routing space, enterprise space and service provider’s space.
And Juniper has been very successful and taking second place in the security networking space and we are starting to move very aggressively with security in the pipeline. The good thing is we are not competing in the same space as IBM, Sun or Oracle, nor HP in a way, and if you look at Cisco they are really narrow, sort of fighting with their traditional rivals.
We stay, a pure play networking and security company, which provides Juniper a huge opportunity in the market and this is also why you have seen the OEM announcement with Dell and also with IBM, in which they are really working with Juniper.
Is the Middle East really ready for cloud computing on this scale that you have announced, because in many enterprises in this region are still looking at the consolidation of their infrastructure and are they really ready to move a lot of it into the cloud?
The good thing is that it is not an architecture that is out there over nothing. What we do is we provide a real gradual approach to it, you can start with our switching products and then you can expand to the infrastructure at their own pace. I think today all enterprises and service providers are suffering from the same challenges. One is the power supply, the space and physicality of how to manage it and how to introduce new applications and bring the total cost of ownership down for their customers.
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