Sander Dales, VP (Services) Juniper Networks, APAC, talked to Prashant L Rao about the $260 mn business that he ran in the APAC, trends in the region in terms of service and support, the networking player’s channel strategy, BYOD and other trends and more
How does India fare vis-a-vis your other markets in the region?
India has some situational challenges at the the moment but it also has some very interesting opportunities. If you look at the ASEAN, Indonesia’s really taking off and following some of the trends that India has in terms of mobile subscriber uptake and traffic growth, sophistication of usage is also increasing significantly. Similar trends are also starting to emerge in Thailand. That country got hit quite badly by the floods last year. Myanmar has started opening up. There’s a burgeoning market there that hasn’t had much exposure to technology. Then we have a mature market in ANZ. There are some interesting parallels in how business is done in ANZ and in India. Some of the most advanced procurement models and sourcing models that we see in the market are there in both geographies.
Vertical-wise, where are you getting traction?
In addition to telcos and MNCs, we also focus on financial services, education or research and on large government or domestic organizations. IT outsourcing remains a strong market. Public infrastructure is another. In some ways, it is government-led and in others, it is led by the private sector.
Five to six years ago, India was an SMS-service driven market. Today, mobile devices have proliferated, traffic has grown, usage is increasingly sophisticated and there is an increasing diversity in terms of the media that’s being used. The other trend is around Cloud-based services; that’s happening in mature markets and it’s emerging in India as well.
Some of our wins in India include Bajaj Capital, Lanco Infratech and Spectranet. We have been doing some work with the Indian outsourcing players. The service provider market remains strong for us. We are selling technologies around virtualization, subscriber control, mobile technologies etc and we just signed our first IPv6 carrier-grade Net deal in India.
You mentioned that the procurement models were quite sophisticated in India. Would you care to elaborate on that?
The market in India’s become quite sophisticated in the way that networks are being procured, it’s not just about the lowest price anymore. It’s around Network as a Service, utility-based billing, consumption-based models, and increasingly around user experience SLAs—whether it’s an enterprise end customer as a user or a mobile user.
We work with IBM, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens on the systems integration side. It’s gone from providing a network and walking away to providing ongoing capacity, to management and forecasting and alignment in the commercial model to the purchaser’s business goals.
What’s your relationship with IBM and HP like considering that both are now playing in the networking space?
IBM OEMs some of our equipment into their switching line. Core and edge routing, high-end security, virtualization and client mobile technologies—those are all areas that IBM doesn’t play in explicitly. The relationship with IBM is global and it’s going extremely well, particularly in India where we have significantly ramped up their certification, training and skills. They have been strong on the IT side of telecom outsourcing and we have some joint projects in the infrastructure side of telecom. In the same breath, some projects in the public sector and FSI are also with IBM.
With HP, we have a relationship that’s more locally bound; it’s present in India and in a couple of other territories in the APAC, but it’s not global. None the less, in terms of overlap, they certainly have the lower-end switching gear. However, we don’t compete at the top end of the data center where we have QFabric, or in high end security for that matter.
There’s also a significant growth in our local partners. For instance, there’s been a massive growth in AGC’s business in terms of the kind of contracts that they are winning and the sophistication of the services that they are delivering.
Across our products, we have the Junos operating system. One of the platforms that we have is Junos Space; it’s an open platform that allows interfacing down to our network and up to high level systems.
What’s the technology that you employ while supporting your customers?
Service Now and Service Insight are the tools in question and this is not just phone home technology. It works in tandem with the scripting capabilities within Junos on the devices, looking at things like heuristics, trending factors, automatic core logging, inventory collection of both hardware and software etc so that we are able to build a clear picture of what the network and the device are doing at any point in time and, as a result, we are able to ensure proactive case opening by Service Now, which does this automatically. This is fully integrated with our backend support systems so that it is able to search our knowledge base and problem reports and so forth and look for matches.
We use our team in situations where subject matter expertise and escalated support are called for. Our partners address the diversity of buying models and they provide a rich multi-vendor experience along with full situational awareness of the customer’s environment. They also provide the local market context in terms of geography, language, cultural context etc.
There’s a lot of buzz around SDN in general and OpenFlow in particular. What’s your take on that?
We have had an open SDK and an open approach to Junos for about eight or nine years now. We have had partners developing applications on the Junos platform for that period of time. Several years ago, we launched an initiative to define standard interfaces—not just at the BGP, Ethernet or ATM level but also control-based interfaces as to how you control networking end-to-end. This is all about defining what application, user profile and the kind of experience that they have either paid for, demanded or need and ensuring that this experience can delivered across all aspects of the network. That’s exactly where we are at today with Junos Base as the platform, the Junos SDKs and the POS control engines that we have. It’s very much in tune with the philosophy of where SDN is going.
Another technology that seems to be trending is that of MDM. Are you playing in this area?
We have a product focused on the mobile packet core, which is fundamental to controlling signaling and data transportation. We also look at the service delivery platform within a mobile network looking at virtualization, virtual gateways and the security profiles there. Then we extend it out to the end user device with Pulse. It allows you to secure and compress access to your VPN etc. We are seeing really good early traction with Pulse and have a number of wins around the world. It’s easy to deploy and truly cloud-based with central policy control. It could be at an enterprise level for private consumption, it could be at a service provider level for cloud-based or white label product resale or some combination of both.
