Juniper NXTWORK Analyst Day Takeaways

New CTO - It was great to see and hear Juniper’s new CTO, Bikash Koley at NXTWORK.  The message was very clear that new networks need to be built, not only from the speeds and feeds technology point of view, but from the operator point of view.  Scale and simplicity are very important and only going to be more critical as billions of IoT devices dump traffic and data on the network.  Juniper is looking to take the network it is building for some of the hyperscalers and Service providers and take help the tier 2/3 Cloud as well as the enterprise customer adopt a cloud architecture for the future.
 
Contrail – The big announcement was OpenContrail joining the Linux foundation.  What we saw in talking to customers and listening to the talks was that Contrail has significant commercial adoption, definitely larger than perceived in the marketplace.  We see the largest hyperscalers and service providers as having their own controllers, but see Juniper leveraging its expertise in this area into smaller Cloud and service providers.  This will give Juniper the opportunity to build, operate, and transfer for many customers. 
 
We were impressed with the caliber of customers that Juniper has.  Juniper has premier Cloud, Service Provider, and Enterprise customers.  We enjoyed listening to Twitter’s VP of engineering on stage as an example.  We see Juniper as one of just a handful of vendors that can support a customer base with this breath and complexity.  We note Juniper mentioned complexity and simplicity throughout the sessions; we only see networking getting more complex, especially as we move beyond 100 Gbps.  It is up to vendors to help the human scale with that complexity and we saw Juniper give many good examples during NXTWORK 2017.