By Petroc Wilton
Juniper Networks’ CEO Rami Rahim is intent on putting the firm’s tumultuous 2014 behind him, driving a “maniacal focus” on its core business of IP networking to stay ahead of competitors with a broader infrastructure play.
And Rahim told CommsDay that Australia was a strategic market for the refocused vendor, already a standout growth area within APAC with potential for future expansion – not least in the opportunities presented by the NBN.
Juniper’s difficult 2014 saw it go through a far-reaching restructure and sell off its Junos Pulse mobile security arm, in the face of slipping revenues and net profits. It also lost previous CEO Shaygan Kheradpir after less than twelve months in the role. But at the firm’s Innovation Showcase event in its Sunnyvale, California HQ, Rahim – whose eighteen-year career with Juniper took him from engineering through to high- level P&L responsibilities – said the transformation work was done.
He appeared earnestly confident that he could “marry together the technology agenda with the business agenda of the company,” announcing a string of cutting-edge switching, routing and security products and services to underline that the vendor was “maniacally focused on IP networking.”
And, in an briefing on the sidelines of the Showcase, Rahim said that Australia and the rest of APAC – last year the weakest region by revenue for the networking vendor, with the regional top line dropping through 2014 – was a key target. “APAC is absolutely a key market for us. You’re right that we saw some weakness there; it’s primarily been in China, where the competitive situation is somewhat more difficult. But in South Asia – countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Australia – we’ve actually seen good growth,” he told CommsDay.
“We have some large, very successful partnerships and customers in Australia; we are already, in fact, delivering great solutions in that market to deliver services to customers and to businesses. We view it as a) a strategic market and b) an area for potential future growth.”
Rahim also highlighted Australia’s NBN, alongside similar projects like the national network in Singapore, as providing opportunities for Juniper. “It changes, to some extent, the nature of the opportunity at hand. When an operator no longer needs to invest in the access infrastructure, they start to look at other ways to differentiate – and that includes the service offerings that they provide over that access infrastructure,” he said.
“And that’s a discussion, and an opportunity, that at Juniper we’re very happy to have. In fact we’re currently benefiting from it in terms of the advanced services that carriers are delivering over NBN.”
Technology Agenda
Under Rahim’s guidance, Juniper’s technology agenda has been developed in close consultation with partners and customers – and is tightly focused on the vendor’s core business of switching and routing. “Juniper is a pure play in IP networking; our competitors, many of [them], are not. They focus across a broader spectrum of infrastructure,” he said. “We’re not going to do that right now; we’re not going to be distracted by anything outside of IP networking. We believe the problems of IP networking have not been solved successfully.”
“Juniper is a technology company, and we need to compete first and foremost by differentiation, and the merits of our products relative to the competition. We must build a better mousetrap! Where we’ve done that in the past, we’ve succeeded; and I bring to the table, now, eighteen years of seeing what has worked and what hasn’t worked.”
There’s also a much stronger emphasis on better integrating security, something Rahim has been flagging since his ascension as a natural fit with the rest of the business. “Security can be a great growth engine for the company, but the approach that we have taken until recently was insufficient to give us access to that growth,” he told CommsDay. “So the pivot we’ve taken was… to think about security as a real complement to our solutions for the datacentre, the campus, the service provider edge. And we have to leverage technology building blocks across all our products that could be very, very beneficial for security.”
“Having knowledge into traffic flows in the datacentre that traverse your switches and routers, and providing that knowledge to the security firewalls – virtual or physical – in the datacentre can actually be very beneficial for improving the overall security posture in the cloud.
That’s an example of a true solution synergy between switching and routing that we currently do not tap into – but the plan now is to absolutely tap into that sort of synergy that exists in the cloud.”
(This article first appeared on www.commsday.com)
