Our products enable telcos to deploy cost efficient network infra and boost agility: Juniper Networks

By Nandita Singh

Sajan Paul, Director of Systems Engineering &CTO at Juniper Networks in India and SAARC has spent 23 years in the networking industry across enterprise, public sector and telecom domain. In an interview to Voice&Data he highlights how the requirement for agility is driving service providers to build distributed telco cloud and drive down operational costs and increased adoption of SDN and NFV.

Voice&Data: What is the market opportunity that you see for Juniper in the telco landscape in India? What problems can you resolve for telcos in India?

Sajan K Paul: Crucial to the success of many of India’s large scale digitization projects and campaigns which have been announced recently, the telecom industry in India is transforming at a phenomenal pace, radically changing the lives of many.

Centered on our goals of helping to drive networking innovation, Juniper Networks has and will continue to enable not just telecom service providers, but also government initiatives to continually strengthen their network infrastructure, for the fastest growing internet population in the world. In particular, with everything seeing a strong shift to the cloud, service providers are increasingly building distributed telco clouds to drive down operational costs and increase agility to better serve their customers, in turn requiring new networking infrastructure and upgrades across their various network setups.

It is precisely because the network plays such a crucial role in addressing the enormous business pressures our customers face, that we feel Juniper is uniquely positioned to capitalize on – through our long-standing market positioning and standing in the region, as well as our successful, active engagement in large scale telecom build outs, the revamping of network infrastructure, as well as large-scale government and defense projects.

Voice&Data: What are the trends in Infrastructure architecture that Juniper is leveraging on?

Sajan K Paul: Just as we see across the world, the networking landscape is in a massive state of transformation in India, with numerous megatrends emerging, usually united by a commonality of customers needs’ shifting from simple to very sophisticated connectivity, requiring high performance, secure networks and cloud ecosystems.

From the increasing adoption of new architectural approaches such as SDN and NFV, to software disaggregation and white box switching, organizations are increasingly turning to new infrastructure architectures, to serve their growing networks with more and more devices, data and traffic on them.

It is thus no surprise that a major driver for organizations to adopt new network infrastructures would be the growing demand for increased network performance, all while enabling these networks to accommodate more data traffic movement without compromising the available bandwidth and speed.

We thus see strong opportunity for Juniper, as these efforts would all rely on cutting-edge network infrastructure to enable these faster and more agile telecom networks. On the enterprise front, a specific demand would be for that of network infrastructure which is easily upgradable, agile, and software controlled. Juniper’s efforts in SDN and NFV related technologies cater to these demands, and can revolutionize the way companies invest in networking infrastructure.

 Voice&Data: How is Juniper positioned technology wise vis-à-vis competition in India market?

Sajan K Paul: From our inception, Juniper has always been a pioneer in the networking industry, where we have consistently introduced highly innovative, best-in-breed solutions to our customers. For example, our Contrail platform has truly changed the way enterprises function, offering one of the most intelligent automation processes and among the highest levels of reliability compared to other solutions in the market.

While we have always had formidable competition, Juniper was born as a challenger to the status quo, and it is part of our DNA to continue providing solutions that are not just different, but better from what is already out there.

In particular, this radical innovation is at the heart of our NFV solutions, translating into the ability to orchestrate the service lifecycle from creation to delivery in a modular open framework, which sets Juniper’s NFV portfolio apart from that of other players in this field.

As a whole, we are proud to have always provided businesses with unmatched levels of security, availability, performance, automation and agility for their network architecture – solutions we are confident we will continue to provide to the Indian market for time to come.

 Voice&Data: What technology or product/ solutions innovations are coming to the market from Juniper for enterprises? Are there vertical specific solutions that you would like to highlight?

Sajan K Paul: From our first-ever product the industry-defining M40 router, Juniper has always pushed technological limits, and we strive to continue introducing products into the market that are not just best-in-breed, but are capable of re-defining it.

An example would be the continued growth of telecom subscribers and cloud service users at an exponential rate, and the resulting bandwidth demands on Data Center Interconnect and Metro environments which need a new approach to keep pace. Even as the underlying infrastructure generally continues to push the physical boundaries of performance among data centers and service provider networks, it’s the typical separation of IP and optical-transport functionality that should no longer occur.

In this regard we have introduced Photonic and Coherent DWDM Interface Cards for the Juniper PTX Series and MX Series routers, new optical layer support for Junos Space Connectivity Services Director (CSD) and Enhanced SDN programmability for Junos OS. These new products will work with existing Juniper packet optical solutions such as the PTX Series and MX Series, and in conjunction with existing management and SDN products such as Junos Space, NorthStar Controller and IP/MPLSView.

In addition to substantial boosts in performance, we are confident that they will also inject the necessary intelligence and visibility across all network layers for greater network control. We believe that these products will help service providers and telecom operators to transform their networks through cost-efficient network infrastructures, reduce operational complexity and increase business agility.

 Voice&Data: What is your technology partner ecosystem like in India market?

Sajan K Paul: Our partner strategy is built on three key pillars intended to drive innovation and growth in the industry. Namely, the ease of doing business through enhanced partner programs including increased specialization, accreditation, marketing and learning; a focus on next-generation high growth areas key to revenue acceleration such as private, public and telco cloud, data center transformation, security and software defined networks; as well as ultimately profitability, in which we reward partners for growing their business with Juniper through incentives, simplified financing, and schemes like the Juniper Market Development Fund.