Juniper is young and that makes us bullish: Ravi Chauhan

BANGALORE, INDIA:  Juniper Networks, which calls itself the 'high-end design house' and believes that diversity is any day better than a single-vendor environment, also takes pride in breaking away from the crowd and delivering best of products at lower costs.

“No vendor can provide you everything that is best of class. At the end of the day, it is not about the best functionality, but the best economics,” says Ravi Chauhan, MD, Juniper Networks. He was speaking to Srinivas Rasoor and Deepa Damodaran of CIOL in an interview recently. Although he shied away from responding to its competitor Cisco's recent marketing campaign, talks in length about cloud, virtualisation, why India is one of its fastest growing markets and more. Excerpts:

CIOL: During the company's Q3 earnings call, Juniper announced that India is doing well. What is driving this growth?

Ravi Chauhan: A virtual cycle is forming in India, which is changing the way enterprises traditionally communicated and computed. This virtual cycle consists of three parts.

The first one is data centre consolidation. Companies are today moving towards this because it is cost effective to concentrate applications and data in one place.

The second is smartphone revolution. It complements the first trend because these smart devices are basically screens, which are untethered wireless devices, that can go anywhere and access data and applications that are 'conveniently centralised'.

As more and more devices come into picture, people want to access even office applications on them.

The third thing is bandwidth, which is used to connect both these things. It is becoming plentiful and cheap.

Another year from now you will have LTE, which can give up to 20 times the bandwidth than today. and I do not expect the prices to be substantially different given the competition and technology and then we will not have any excuse not to use it.

So as Steve Jobs kept saying, the 'Post PC Era' is definitely here and one can feel and touch it.

The reason why we are doing well is that we are at the heart of this virtual cycle, which is building up in the country.

Today corporate departments can not specify that people can use only a particular type of device and application.

Juniper has its share of data centre products, security suite of products called Junos Pulse, a thin client that resides in every device, irrespective of whether it is a BlackBerry or Samsung, Android or Windows and connects your device with enterprise network and also provides anti-virus protection for the device.

Bandwidth is the business we have always been in. Today we are enabling wireless operating as well. With LTE, so much of data capability will come in. So just imagine the load that is going to come into the back-end network.

We are enabling wireless operators so that they can beef up their backbone network, in order to deal with the data deluge that is happening.

So everywhere Juniper architecture plays a reference play, which is why it is growing so rapidly.

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CIOL: That was for the previous year. However, now that companies like HP, Dell are also getting into the networking space, what is your outlook for the coming year?

Ravi: These two are worthwhile corporates and they have good access to market. However, Juniper plays at the high-end of the market, where there is nobody else.

HP and Dell are both at the commodity level, where we do not play much. We have an access to market problem there.

Most of our technologies and products are aimed at the top-end market, where people really want to scale and function.

CIOL: So when do you plan to look at this commodity market?

Ravi: We will do it. Based on the strength and strategy everyone enters a space. Our strength has been at the top, so we will probably come to bottom from there, whereas others will be coming bottom-up.

CIOL: Which are the sectors you think are going to contribute more in your growth?

Ravi: We are actually focusing on four sectors, which are growing fast and have the ability to absorb our technology. They are service providers, technology sector, banking and finance (BFSI) and government.

CIOL: Is the requirement same for all these sectors?

Ravi: No. Their requirements and buying behaviour differ. For a service provider the ability to scale is the key, whereas, the tech sector wants functionality-rich technology, which is resilient, secure and reliable.

For banking and finance security is the key, especially now that RBI has given a new set of guidelines for all scheduled banks. And for the government sector everything is important.

CIOL: What are you doing at the virtualisation and cloud fronts?

Ravi: Junosphere was how we adopted cloud internally. Our whole Junos is on the cloud. One can do testing, software development, trials, and even architecture simulation of a physical network virtually on cloud.

In terms of cloud technology, we have QFabric. Cloud is a nothing but a very large data centre with very good network connection. We play a three-fold role in here.

First is switch. Today in order to scale from 5,000 or 6000 to 10 Gig, you need three layers of switches. There is no single switch that can scale to that level of connectivity and degree of bandwidth.

We are the only one in the industry to ship products that can scale to that level, which means that every device in the data centre is just one hop from the other. So we have one large switch fabric that connects everything to everything - storage, server and network.

The advantage is that it cuts down latency and we can guarantee that anywhere to anywhere inside data centre is just 5 micro seconds and with lesser devices manageability cost comes down.

Second is security. When you build a cloud, you need robust security system to provide security at that scale and processing power. We have virtual firewall, which can regulate traffic between virtual servers.

The third is that all these switches and other infrastructure need to connect to outer world. We have MX960 routers for that, which are functionality rich and have high capacity to be deployed in largescale clouds.

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CIOL: When you say 'no one is anywhere near us in any of these technologies', do you include Cisco as well?

Ravi: Absolutely, any day.

CIOL: Sometime back Cisco had come out with a marketing campaign, where it claimed that you have not met with your promises with regards to the release dates of your technologies. What is your take on that?

Ravi: It is not Juniper that has to react to that. It was aimed at the market and you should see how the market reacted to that.

We are very focused on customers, and are delivering those solutions to customers. We are seeing complete acceptance and uptake for our solutions from customers. So, as far as we are concerned it has not impacted us.

CIOL: There are reports that the US is still not doing well and another economic downturn is expected. So how is it impacting the technology spending from technology companies?

Ravi: Certainly, there is cautiousness. However, we have not seen any major impact yet from an Indian market point of view. Nothing unusual has happened on the margins as well, yet. We are also cautious in terms of spending or laying out new plans.

CIOL: How is it possible for you to keep the prices so low, despite having cutting edge technology?

Ravi: The two are not mutually exclusive. That is the foundation upon which Juniper was built. If you look at the company's origin, founder Pradeep Sindhu, whose basic specialisation was semiconductor, saw the potential of applying high performance hardware and chip-sets to completely change the price performance of networking, especially routing.

That is how the first Juniper products were born. Not only were they faster, better, and robust, but also cost effective. Now fast forwarding it a little bit to QFabric, there is no one in the industry who can even come close to this product.

Another reason why people are adopting it is because it is actually much cheaper to use that architecture, and also effective than traditional multi-layer architecture.

Sometime ago there was this whole debate on quality. Today everybody understands that quality is given in our products. Building a high quality product is actually cheaper than building a cheap, less quality product.

There are no implementation of QFabric in India, yet. We are working on it.

CIOL: What is the size of the market that you address and what is your market size?

Ravi: The total addressable market for us is over a billion dollars. We have about seven-eight per cent market share in the current year. That gives us a lot of scope to grow. because we are no way near to our fair share and which is why we are very bullish and growth orientated.

CIOL: How is it that you have a very less market share despite having cutting edge technology?

Ravi: Juniper is just over a billion and quarter dollar company with 8,000 employees. It is relatively a small company, which is on a fast track of growth. A lot of people are surprised when we say this because they do not realise that Juniper is so small.

We are a 14-year-old young company and very bullish. We are just one-tenth the size of our largest competitor in the market. That is why there is so much of bullishness and  excitement about Juniper within Juniper and outside as well.