A service provider’s biggest weapon is its broad physical presence and ability to deploy and distribute data centres close to the end-user. The problem today is making networking for enterprises, service providers and cloud providers less complex. California-based Juniper Networks has developed mobile solutions that reduce the complexity of deploying and operating a distributed mobile cloud and also make it simpler for service providers to offer new, differentiated services, increasing revenue and reducing customer churn. “We believe that creating simplicity through engineering is innovation’s highest form,” says Sajan Paul, director for systems engineering, India & Saarc, Juniper Networks in a recent interview with Sudhir Chowdhary. Excerpts:
What are the current technology trends in networking industry? How do you see the latest technologies being adopted by the Indian customers?
I would like to group the current transformation areas under three categories—connectivity, enterprise multicloud and security. With the massive adoption of 4G, connectivity is rapidly changing within the wireless space, and at affordable costs. However, in India, one of the biggest challenges is last-mile connectivity due to the lack of fiberisation. Some of the key initiatives driven by the government like the National Optical Fibre Network project (NOFN) is envisaged to solve this issue. Looking ahead, 5G is just around the corner—with over 10x capacity, it is set to bring wireless broadband with increased speeds to the masses. Enterprise multicloud is another inevitable enabler for the ever-increasing digitisation projects. Harnessing cloud providers—SaaS and PaaS, on-site resources like server, storage and compute could potentially create a multicloud fabric. While this solution has been available for some time, creating an infrastructure that spans any cloud, workload and policy will be an uphill task. Juniper’s Contrail Multicloud addresses this challenge. Security has always been at the heart of all transformation. Multicloud is adding more complexity to this challenge with AI, machine learning (ML) and sophisticated ATP engines assisted by automation moving at an extremely fast pace. We are seeing early adoptions in all these areas in India across all verticals.
What are the core business focus areas for Juniper Networks in India today?
Juniper is focusing on a few fundamental areas of transformation—build affordable telecom infrastructure to serve ever-increasing customer demands and continue to create a solid foundation for new technologies like 5G. These solutions are targeted to help enterprises with their connectivity and multicloud strategy; ultimately, to build a strong infrastructure by harnessing automation and advances within the AI/ ML framework.
How can telcos manage the increasing traffic and deliver superior services?
As mentioned earlier, reliable connectivity remains a key challenge for the telcos. Complementary to the various government initiatives, Juniper is building next generation networking solutions with multi- dimensional scaling to support that. Some of these key technologies are packet optical convergence, silicon photonics, network automation and telemetry. Building networks at cloud scale is the new mantra.
How are you dealing with cybersecurity issues?
Juniper has introduced several advanced technologies to tackle this. Software Defined Secure Networks (SDSN) is the platform to create the entire network as a security enforcement point. It takes care of detection, analysis and mitigation in a 360-degree loop.
What is the potential of SDN and NFV in India today. Would you say India is still not a mature market for such technologies?
SDN/NFV is an enabler in accelerating digitisation and building infrastructure at cloud scale. We are seeing more maturity in this domain. Juniper is actively working on SDN based automation and virtualisation. I am of the view that this will become inevitable to drive Serrano technology transformations like 5G soon.
