Juniper to Emulate VMware, Dive Into Broader Commercial Market

Juniper Networks wants to follow in VMware's footsteps and make its offering more appealing to commercial clients by making it easier to acquire and integrate.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based vendor has moved more and more in recent years from being deployed in purely open source settings to being utilized straight off the shelf by commercial customers, thanks to streamlined services and support, and Contrail's turnkey cloud orchestration and automation platform, according to Daniel McGinniss, Juniper's senior director of cloud solutions marketing.

"These are the things helping customers start to actually adopt these technologies, rather than just look at them as a hobby or something fun to play with in a lab," McGinniss said Tuesday during a breakout session of the Best of Breed Conference, hosted by CRN's parent The Channel Company.

Juniper wants emulate VMware to tap more into commercial buyers that value simplicity and prioritize getting a product off the shelf more easily over customization, McGinniss said at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Fla.

"VMware is the epitome of a company that's come in and put the 'easy' button into server virtualization, to the point where servers nowadays are deploying in minutes," McGinniss said.   

The vendor, though, has no intent of abandoning its pure open-source customers who pine for significant customization and don't want to pay the taxes associated with off-the-shelf commercial applications, McGinniss said. These customers are often looking to migrate from VMware to an open-source, hypervisor type of environment, he said.

"People are living in a different world now," McGinniss said. "People are exchanging information in much more global ways."

Open source has become an important part of daily conversations much more quickly than industry experts anticipated, McGinniss said, taking far less than the 15 years Linux needed to become mainstream.

Even though Juniper acquired Contrail in December 2012, McGinniss said the company is committed to supporting and fully integrating with a multitude of platforms, including VMware and NSX. Juniper sees values in allowing the platforms to live side by side rather than forcing customers to choose one since many clients will use VMware or NSX as their primary network and Contrail as their secondary network. 

Unlike other vendors, McGinniss said Juniper is dedicated to making incremental improvements to its offering rather than telling customers to hold out for a shiny new box with greater functionality that might not be implemented for another two years. Juniper is particularly interested in figuring out ways to add value to its existing product set by introducing more automation, McGinniss said.