How Juniper Networks is Innovating Networks with Broadcom

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Early this year, I had an opportunity to sit down with Rami Rahim, the CEO of Juniper Networks, to talk about the view from the CEO’s office, the role of innovation and how he was able to manage the company through one of the most demanding eras any leader could ever imagine.

During a 25-year career at Juniper where he was employee No. 32, Rami has had a front row seat to observe how advanced networking and connectivity solutions would come to reshape how we worked and lived.

For the last two decades, Juniper has been one of the leaders of the networking industry, providing technologies that underpin the networking infrastructures for countless service providers, enterprises, and data centers around the world.

Below are some key insights from our conversation, and you can listen to the entire interview here as well:

• Making Things Simple

In Rami’s first few years at Juniper, the company worked primarily on building solutions to help the internet scale. That required ongoing innovation in the space simply to keep up with the insatiable demand back then. Today, the top challenge has shifted, with customers needing help solving the technological complexity that threatens to slow down their operations – or even halt progress entirely.

This is where what Rami dubs “Experience-First Networking” enters the picture. In brief, the idea is to radically simplify every aspect of the job from design and installation: configuring, operating, and visualizing various facets of the network. Juniper now strives to build networks that not only connect themselves, but that are themselves cloud-connected and supply the cloud with valuable data. That precious data trove will inform in real time, whether the network is actually performing to the required standards.  

• Strategic Partnership with Broadcom  

The strategic nature of a many years-long partnership with Broadcom has paid major dividends at Juniper. When looking at his objectives, Rami wanted a strategic, innovative semiconductor partner with sufficient scale and breadth to support a full suite of solutions for Juniper’s customers, particularly in the enterprise service and cloud provider sectors.

As Rami put it, Juniper is a technology company “and so we're looking for partners that invest significantly in R&D and manufacturing to enable the kinds of silicon solutions with the most advanced process nodes that can keep up with the scale and performance telemetry capabilities of all of the products that we are bringing to market.”

• What's Next on the Network Horizon?

If there’s one certainty about the technology business, it’s that people will always want to push the envelope of what is normal in network performance. So with a team of strategists and technologists, Rami has put a priority on innovation, especially with regards to the internet and networking. How these trends will interact and what the networks of tomorrow will look like are still being developed.  Still, Rami does have firm ideas about the general contours of that emerging future. When I asked Rami what his vision for networking will be as the internet evolves to its next generation, his response was simple: it’s to get it out of the way.

It might sound odd for the leader of a multi-billion-dollar networking company to be talking about moving their products out of the spotlight. But he is really highlighting his goal to make networking speeds and feeds seamless for customers, so they can focus on the outcomes and experiences.

Removing the complexities and limitations for humans trying to keep up with our insatiable demand for network services is a noble, holistic vision indeed.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Web3, Metaverse, cryptocurrency or any other topic, the network isn’t actually going away. It just might be a little less visible.

When it comes to the actual experience of working with networks, Rami paints an optimistic picture, saying that we're just scratching the surface. For example, AI engines are dramatically simplifying the experience for network operators as they push that technology further into the future to make things better.  His promise: expect more innovation from Juniper around automation, AI, and machine learning which will dramatically transform the experience of networks and removes lingering bottlenecks. 

To help with that continued innovation, Juniper works closely with Broadcom, benefitting from a broad portfolio of solutions and a company that powers the most complex IT environments in the world. Broadcom products have been designed and optimized for end-to-end integration and deliver the best-possible performance.  That’s Connected by Broadcom.