Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Juniper Networks, Inc
Manoj Leelanivas, Juniper Networks | Juniper Networks AI-Native NOW
Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst for theCUBE Research is joined by Manoj Leelanivas, Chief Operating Officer at Juniper Networks as part of theCUBE's coverage of Juniper Networks AI-Native NOW from the New York Stock Exchange.
To learn more please visit: https://juni.pr/thecube
About Manoj Leelanivas
Manoj Leelanivas, Chief Operating Officer of Juniper Networks, has been discussing the company's AI-native networking platform and its focus on user experience and operational simplification. In an August 2024 interview at the New York Stock Exchange, Leelanivas stated that the company aims to "transcend connectivity" and make networking "all about the experience." He noted that Juniper has collected telemetry data for eight years and that its Marvis AI engine can predict and self-correct 80 to 90% of network problems. Leelanivas also highlighted customer outcomes, including one early customer that eliminated 90% of IT network trouble tickets after deploying Juniper Mist, and a large logistics provider that achieved an 85% reduction in mean time to resolution. Leelanivas has also discussed Juniper's efforts to ease AI adoption for customers. He described the company's Enterprise Blueprint as a program to smooth the adoption phase, and mentioned Marvis Minis, a digital twin capability that allows customers to model and test network environments ahead of time. In a May 2023 interview, Leelanivas characterized the network as "the one last remaining piece that hasn't been modernized" in IT infrastructure, and said Juniper's software and AI work positions the company to capitalize on evolving network opportunities. He emphasized the company's focus on automating day-zero, day-one, and day-two operations to improve experiences for both customers and end users.
Transcript (12 segments)
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Bob0:11
Excited to be at the New York Stock Exchange with Juniper where they rang the opening bell. And today I'm really proud to have Manoj Leelanivas here, CEO of Juniper Networks. Welcome, Manoj.
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Manoj Leelanivas0:22
Great to be here, Bob.
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Bob0:25
So obviously a very exciting day, 15th anniversary on the stock exchange, getting to ring the bell, and on top of that doing one of the Juniper AI Native Now events here. So a lot of customers coming in, learning more about that. For everyone who's watching at home, maybe you could give an introduction or an overview of the AI native networking platform that you announced earlier this year.
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Manoj Leelanivas0:47
Like you said, it was wonderful to be here at the opening bell. When you think about networking, you think about... you're missing a couple of seconds or maybe even a minute of that concert, people won't like that. Or most recently, there was a French Olympics, imagine 100 meter dash and you missed the last few seconds. Correct. So you want networking to be highly experienced. And our focus is to make sure that for our operators, we give a completely simplified experience in terms of operations, simplified operations for their network, and for end users, a superlative experience. You know, whether it's in Teams or Zoom or whatever, you're having the best experience possible. And the AI native network is all about providing that.
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Bob1:47
And how does it do that?
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Manoj Leelanivas1:49
It actually does it because we have been collecting telemetry, we've been collecting multiple data points from users, from access... predict problems in the network. So we almost are at a point where the network is almost self-healing. 80 to 90% of the problems are corrected by our Marvis AI engine. So in much similar ways as you have a self-driving network, self-driving world happening with you know the Teslas and the AVs, you have a self-driving network happening here. And that's what the AI native network is all about. It's about providing the simplicity for customers, providing assurance for the customers, and amazing increase in productivity. And that's what this AI network provides.
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Bob2:44
Absolutely. And I think we're starting to see more and more organizations looking to adopt AI, right? They're understanding some of those challenges around complexity and so forth, and really starting to see that AI is going to help... day-to-day activities. I have a lot of use cases to share, but I think let me start with one of our early customers. Cisco now, before they deployed Juniper, they had a lot of trouble tickets in IT networking. And once they deployed Juniper Mist, they were able to eliminate almost 90% of their IT network trouble tickets. What does this mean? Valuable time back to people so they can actually do better work. You know, changes the whole equation in terms of cost. You're not thinking about resources, you're not thinking about truck rolls and whatnot. Yeah. Similarly, Gap, one of the retailers in the world, strong retailers in the world, ever since they moved to Juniper, they've been able to eliminate 85% of the truck rolls. One of the largest logistics providers in the world out of... you look at higher education, one of the top technology universities in the world, they deployed Juniper over summer, and the quote from the head of IT was, 'Deploying Juniper was like waking up from a dream.' And most recently, I think this is another public reference, Dartmouth College. They were able to get up and running during the COVID time. It took just 12 hours to get all their dorms up and running with 2,000 access points and everything ready to go, and kids, students could come in and have the Zooms and Teams and everything, and everything was working flawlessly. It's the speed of deployment, it's how we eliminate the problems before they happen, and even if problems happen, how quickly we resolve them. So we give valuable time back to people. Saves a lot of... technology that you've built is incredibly sound. There's always that cultural aspect and what I like to refer to as a time to comfort. I wonder if you could comment on what you're seeing from customers who are adopting from deployment to actually getting in and really taking hold of that AI, really adopting it, really believing in it, and validating that the recommendations are correct, that the fixes are correct. How long does it usually take organizations for that time to come?
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Manoj Leelanivas5:39
It's a very good question, because AI and integrating AI is actually quite complex, right? And there is always this learning curve, sometimes there's always the knowledge gap, skills gap. You don't get enough people who know AI well, and training people isn't easy. So this is... entire phase of testing, procuring, adoption, as well as deployment, and then finally operations. So how can we get people up and running faster? And we're putting a specific set of programs, curated curriculum, training courses, and also a lot of handholding to get people up and running and going fast. So this is the Enterprise Blueprint, and we are able to deliver almost 9x the value compared to anything else out in the industry. We are really creating a self-driving network, but it's very easy to adopt.
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Bob6:42
Awesome. So this is obviously something you announced today, bringing out the Blueprint. And so you have already had customers who've deployed and gotten tremendous value. Now you're learning from those deployments and putting together a more structured program that enables organizations to... our customer deployments, a lot of things which worked really well and a few things which we can do better, and we are packaging everything in a systematic way in this Blueprint. Excellent, excellent. That sounds great. Now I also know that some of the challenges with adopting a network across an end-to-end environment is it can get quite detailed, it can get quite intricate, especially when it comes to pricing and licensing and so forth, things like that. I'm wondering if you can tell us, I think you had some announcements today also on that front. So if you could give us some of the details and share with the people watching what it is that Juniper is doing to help simplify the purchasing process.
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Manoj Leelanivas7:47
We actually made it super easy in terms of any use case people want to try, and if they like that use case... know where it's more standardized, you know, by the standard, and we can even customize the Enterprise Agreement. For instance, if you're buying Wi-Fi and wired, you're not buying SD-WAN but you're buying routing, you can actually package an Enterprise Agreement in such a way so it makes it simple, flexible, and also repeatable for taking to different customers and making it easy for our customers and partners. In addition, we're working with our partners to provide Network as a Service, which is a flexible buying model. People like different business models. They want to pay as you go, they want to lease certain things, they want to try for three months and then maybe not go forth. They have the flexibility to make that decision now because we can actually provide Network as a Service working with partners who provide that service with Juniper... and Europe, and they came back and we asked them what some of the biggest AI challenges were, and the number one was, 'We don't have a single AI engine to go across our end-to-end network.' And essentially, that's what Juniper has just done, right? So across the WAN, wired, wireless, data center, routing, etc., you've really got a single engine. So now you're bringing that Enterprise Agreement and the NaaS type to enable the simplify organizations to take advantage of that end-to-end environment.
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Bob9:37
You said it very well. Across all use cases, from wired, wireless, SD-WAN, data center, routing, everything, you can take what you want. And the best part is that we also have this new capability we announced a few months ago called Marvis Minis, yes, which is the digital twin for the network. So now we can completely model the network... these problems ahead of time so that experience is flawless when your CEO has this important video call. So you have the ability to do these digital twins across the network, and that's an amazing new invention which further amplifies our focus on the experience for network, but more importantly, it actually simplifies the adoption curve, eases the adoption curve for our customers.
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Manoj Leelanivas10:34
Well, look, I think we could probably sit here all day and go back and forth talking about this, but I think that's all the time we have today. So I want to thank you, Manoj, for being here. I want to thank everyone for joining us as well. And obviously, if you want to learn more about Juniper and what they're doing with their AI Native Now and their AI native platform and some of the announcements today, please...