Rami Rahim took over the reins 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 all of 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 largest 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 our 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.

How difficult was it for you to bring about this change?

I am approaching my 19th year anniversary in the company, so I know the company very well. I know the people - I was employee number 32. I know our customers and all of our stakeholders and I’m not going to say it’s easy. When you are a part of a company that is 9,000 people strong and close to $5 billion in revenue, you know change is not that easy. But I would say that the focus on that change by me, by my leadership team, the drive and the motivation that we have seen across the entire company in terms of all our employees - has made it possible. It has also made my job much easier, if you will. So I’m very proud of the team. I’m exceptionally proud of the Juniper team that has navigated through the top decisions that we needed to make, and now executing in a way, that I’m extremely proud of.

Is the restructuring process over?

Yes, that is behind us. We might make tweaks here and there, going forward, but all of the heavy lifting, in terms of sharpening the strategy and the restructuring of the organisation, is at this point, behind us. Now when I sit down, at the table with the rest of my leadership team on a weekly basis, we think about our execution and our strategy, it feels much like the early days of a start-up - very easy to make decisions, clear up the roles and responsibilities, easier to execute, easier to innovate - and I feel very good about that and it’s already starting to help us tremendously.

What does technologies such as software defined networks, visualization, 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 which 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 thats what the telcos need to do and will be able to do.

What would be your advice be to telecom companies 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. It is true that today network operators have to deal with massive growth of capacity and insatiable consumer appetite for mobile access and video. But they can start essentially small by taking on a project of a limited size, working with a technology partner such as Juniper Networks to help them in getting over or moving through this transformation. And they will see the value of it. I think they can very easily build a very good business case to take it much wider scale. This is exactly how we are engaging many network operators around the world including India. I think that's the best recipe for telecom operators to move forward.

So in the battle between telcos and OTT, telcos can actually win this?

I think they can compete very effectively and be much more relevant to the value, to the end user that ultimately will result in a greater ability to monetise. Today, the perception of value has moved above the IP connectivity layer into cloud and cloud services. They themselves must move in that direction as well. But couple that with the incredible power of connectivity, they already have to be able to better monetise their networks and drive topline growth. It’s that topline growth that has been elusive to many telecom operators and cable operators that they must figure how to solve. And that cloud-based delivery of new services is the right recipe in my opinion.

Your take on efforts by companies like Facebook and Google in experimenting with new ways of taking Internet to consumer. Will this disrupt traditional networking companies like Juniper?

I think that the Internet is arguably the most important platform for innovation ever invented. And the reason why people are thinking of all these new approaches to connect all the un-connected is because you need to provide that foundation in order to enable the innovation, and to make that innovation accessible by all. The fact of the matter is, there is a large number of people in this world that are in locations that are very difficult to reach by fiber connectivity and even mobile access, in some cases. So some of these new technologies that are being conceived, while they might appear to be pretty far out there in terms of the approach that is being used, I would very much encourage. In fact, I don't view this at all as disruptive to what we do, it only makes it more necessary for the kind of technologies we need to provide to other industries to provide this ubiquitous connectivity. There will never be a limit to consumption of network capacity by humans. We need to think of innovative ideas to connect everybody in this planet.

Some of these web 2.0 companies are also getting into the cloud space. Amazon is an example. Do you see that as a threat?

No, not at all. It is absolutely an opportunity. To be clear, all of them started in the cloud because they developed their cloud infrastructure primarily to offer services to their end users. In the case of Amazon, they were an e-commerce company, they were selling books, then products, then everything. What Amazon decided to do was, they understood the incredible power of their own cloud in helping them achieve their business objectives. Wow, I can help many others in achieving their own business objectives by giving them access to our cloud infrastructure. Since then, of course, many others have followed suit including Microsoft Azure and Google and others. But it's all cloud. It's just a matter of the business model and what access you give to your consumers in those clouds; just services or is it the infrastructure or is it the platform?

What do you make of the Indian market now?

I am very 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 Modi's vision for this country - Digital India initiative is absolutely exciting, and his energy is very much contagious. Much of what he is trying to achieve in making governments accessible and making them more efficient and helping to connect the rural areas of this country and building smart cities and hundreds of thousands of 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 very significant role in transforming this country.

What is your road map for the Indian market?

We already have a very solid foundation in this market. First, in terms of how we do our own R&D and innovation. We have over 2,500 individuals in this country that are contributing to the development and innovation in the company. And that will continue and grow with time. We are already present in large government networks like the National Knowledge Network that connects research institutes and schools together, department of post, railway ticketing, the state-wide area networks and several airports. In a sense we are already part of the Digital India initiative. But of course, the ambitions of this government are huge and the kind of infrastructure, the scope and scale of the infrastructure is likely never before seen in history.

No one technology provider can possibly offer everything that is required, and we are absolutely going to continue to invest as we have invested historically.

What keeps you awake?

You know Juniper was born as a challenger in this industry, we were born a disruptor to the status quo. The very first product that we built was a radical, new approach to implementing a modern day router that helped the Internet scale to what it is today. That DNA has persisted with us throughout our lifetime and it will persist with us going forward. So we’re always challenging ourselves, we’re challenging the status quo, we’re looking at new and innovative ways at doing things. And if that means some level of disruption, we’re not letting that scare us. We’re going to be the disruptor, if you will. Of course, there are start-ups and there are companies out there that have nothing to lose are always going to be aggressive in trying new things out, but I would say that Juniper and myself, my leadership style is, I subscribe to the velocity that only the paranoids survive. We ourselves are always looking for new ways of doing things.

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 premises equipment that was difficult and expensive to manage that made it very 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. We just announced a few days ago a partnership with AT&T which will help them move towards a completely virtual software approach in delivering services to those enterprise customers which makes it far more easy for them to innovate more quickly, to offer more services quickly, and to reduce cost of those operations. We’re doing something very similar with Orange Business Services in France. That kind of approach or that kind of capturing the inflection point towards cloud architecture in the telecom space is extremely exciting to me. Another area : many of our customers are major cloud providers around the world. What they are interested in, is tapping into the vast amount of information that’s currently trapped in their networks, to do it in real time and to do it with the ability to absorb a lot of information, and to apply analytics and to derive insights that help them better run their businesses as well as better monetize their business. We are providing that capability inside of our infrastructure that gives them access to that information with high performance that is another area that is very exciting for me.

Where does India rank as far as Juniper is concerned in terms of market size?

In terms of opportunity in this market, the opportunity for growth and to participate in projects and in scale and magnitude of projects, it ranks up there on the very top. I’d say that the only other country that has a baseline in terms of existing Internet users and the growth going forward, is China.

There is speculation that you are going to be acquired and that you are up for sale. As a pure play, standalone company, what’s the way forward for Juniper?

There is some consolidation that is happening in the industry but at the same time you have to keep in mind that the pace of this transformation is so fast and the magnitude of the transformation in the network industry is so great, that I think the winners are ultimately going to be those who can innovate, and do so quickly and to work very closely with our customers, to help them overcome the challenges and hurdles of transformation in a close and engineered dev ops model. I think that’s where Juniper can leverage its size to our advantage, and that’s the focus of the company. We’re absolutely determined to be the leader in innovation in the pure-play IT space. We complement that innovation with fantastic partnerships we have. We have partnered and completed our solutions in the area of Radio Access Networks or partners that complete our solutions from a computer storage standpoint. So I think we can really be the best of both worlds for our customers. We can give them the best-in-breed products in IP networking and security, and can also give them end-to-end solutions through effective partnerships. That’s the strategy we are executing on.

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