Rami Rahim took over the reigns of Juniper Networks in November last year at a time when the company was going through a rough phase. But since then Rahim has sought to re-engineer the company. BusinessLine met the CEO of Juniper Networks during his recent visit to India to know how he turned around the company and his take on opportunities in India.

It’s been just under a year for you at the helm. What would be the themes that you are driving at Juniper?

Last year was aimed at focusing and aligning our organisation and sharpening our strategy that required a lot of hard work. This year we are pivoting more towards innovation and execution.

We started the year by introducing, what in my opinion, is the best line-up of new products across our technology areas since the birth of our company. In the last couple of quarters, we have seen good momentum, but I also think that there is still a lot of hard work and opportunity ahead for us in this company. Our best days are still ahead.

What would be the key elements of the innovation?

This industry is going through, what I believe to be, the biggest transformation since the birth of the company and that transformation is around software delivered value. When we talk about software, we must talk about cloud and cloud architectures. So much of what we are doing in this company right now, is transforming the economics of IP networking in a way that enables cloud architectures. Now what does that mean? It means developing the infrastructure for the cloud as well as the software that helps customers deliver value over that infrastructure to essentially reap or capture this inflection point that is happening in the industry. You can see that everything we are doing today and all the products that we are announcing are already starting to pay off and I think it’s going to continue to pay off for us going forward.

What do technologies such as software defined networks, visualisation and cloud mean to the end user?

Well, for an end user, technology means incredible innovations in terms of the services in the applications that the user has access to. Much of the new services in the applications that we see today whether it be free delivery services or music delivery services, they are built on the concept of cloud architectures and high bandwidth connection between the cloud and the consumer services. If it was not for that high bandwidth connectivity, none of these services would be possible. We would still be going to a brick and mortar store to buy movies, plug it into your television in order to see what is it that you want to see. Who has the patience for that these days? These days, people want instant access to information and entertainment whenever they want to and that’s what these cloud architectures actually enable.

All these buzzwords in the industry really translates to one simple thing, which is automation. Automation drives agility and it reduces cost of operations. So agility means you don’t wait for 2 years to be able to deliver that service. You can do it in a matter of days and weeks. That’s what the Web 2.0, hyper scaling companies are doing today and that’s what the telcos need to do and will be able to do.

What would be your advice to telcos who are on one hand squeezed by the need for large amounts of capital investment and on the other face competition from agile internet companies?

Well, if you look at what the Web 2.0 companies are doing, these are companies that were born in cloud, they have the cloud infrastructure and the value they deliver over them. They are building out their cloud infrastructures ferociously. They are doing this because that infrastructure has immense value, the services that they deliver to their users. Telcos are sitting on a gold mine and that is their network. They have this opportunity to convert much of the network locations that they already own to next generation scaled out cloud infrastructure that can deliver value to their customers with far greater agility than they can deliver today. That's what many of them are starting to do.

What do you make of the Indian market now?

I am bullish about the opportunity in this market with 350 million users, broadband adoption growing at the rate of over 60 per cent year over year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for this country — Digital India initiative is absolutely exciting, and his energy is very much contagious when he was in Silicon Valley. Much of what he is trying to achieve in making governments accessible and making them more efficient and helping to connect the rural areas and building smart cities and smart villages, much of that depend on infrastructure and connectivity, and that connectivity is all IP connectivity, and Juniper is a pure-play innovator in IP networking technologies so we can have a significant role in transforming this country.

What excites you as far as technology innovation is concerned?

There are many things but I’ll give you an example. The traditional way of providing services by a telecom operator to an enterprise involved complex physical on premise equipment that was difficult and expensive to manage that made it difficult for the telecom operator to provide new and innovative services over time, because they were essentially locked in over time by the capabilities of the physical device and so many operators are now starting to think of how they can break free from that lock-in of the physical hardware and also reducing the cost of those services, and to operate much more like Web providers with cloud architectures.

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