After focusing for many years on reducing capital expenditures, McGinniss said end users now want to decrease operational expenses so they can reallocate resources currently spent on mundane, repetitive tasks to focus more on research and innovation.

"We've gotten to a point where, from a percentage standpoint, we cannot reduce the cost of hardware exponentially," McGinniss said.

This has created a massive opportunity for Juniper and its channel partners, both to automate rote tasks and augment, train and complement end users on the research and development side of their businesses, McGinniss said.

Juniper is trying within the next five years to get customers to a point where everything is automated after a single click, McGinniss said, so that applications can start up and servers can be spawned with very little human intervention.

Today, though, McGinniss said things are very manual, with a series of tasks created and a bunch of people in the background having to implement those tasks every time a change request comes in.

In addition to commercial and open-source buyers, McGinniss said Juniper also sees a type of customer focused on DevOps and automating repetitive, mundane and costly tasks. DevOps clients, though, usually don't want to take on the risk associated with moving to a full-blown, self-service cloud portal, he said. 

Sean Thompson, vice president of sales at Sysorex, is impressed by Juniper's focus on looking for ways to differentiate itself in the market, particularly around increasing agility, reducing costs and enhancing the user experience.

The Larkspur, Calif.-based company is a new Juniper partner, Thompson said, and plans to look at its end-user accounts to ensure it's tailoring the vendor's offering to customer specifications rather than simply dumping product on clients.