Director
Systems Engineering, Juniper Networks, India & SAARC
The company started off with three employees in India when internet was in its infancy and there were limited web browsers and websites. It noticed a great opportunity in ensuring connectivity with everyone, said Sajan Paul, Director, Systems Engineering, Juniper Networks, India & SAARC, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN)
Tell us about Juniper’s business operations in India
Juniper has been founded with one mission — Connect Everything and Empower Everyone. We are in the business of network infrastructure and we have three major business units namely routing, switching and security. We work on three verticals that are service providing businesses, public-private sector and the enterprise sector (includes BFSI). We recently celebrated 20 years in India and have the largest engineering presence in country.
How has been Juniper’s experience of creating its footprints in India in last 20 years?
Juniper started off with three employees in India. At that point internet was in its infancy and there were very limited web browsers and websites. Juniper saw a great opportunity in ensuring connectivity with everyone. We decided that internet protocol (IP) and ethnet (a family of computer networking technologies commonly used in local area network) are the two major technologies. So we started creating products that will exponentially grow in all dimensions. We normally talk about three dimensions that are scale, subscriber base and services. Keeping this in mind we started building most scalable and service rich router to begin with. That’s how we started establishing ourselves in India.
Which have been the key elements driving Juniper in India all these years?
The most important things in a business are customer intimacy, understanding the real business need and translating that into technology solution. There is a tendency of oversizing the network. A misconception is that the feature will be taken care of. But today’s operators don’t have that kind of budget that can be oversized beyond a point. So we have a network that can grow step-by-step, depending on the demand of scaleout.
Today’s telecom companies are interested in monetising their existing infrastructure and getting new applications on board. They emphasise more on the top players and make revenue out of that. Telecom operators are of late gathering a lot of customer intelligence and then they provide personalised service. By 2020, we will see two-time higher population of devices in India. Nearly 25 to 30 million devices will come into picture.
What about Juniper’s market share at present?
We are one of the leading vendors in the routing space and we are also one of the leading vendors in building cloud scale out data centres. We build devices that has two or three time greater capacity than competing vendors.
How prepared are you for future challenges?
Technology is the need of the hour. We all have to move into automated systems. Skill set transformation for the existing engineers is a necessity, as this will develop their relevance in future.
Do you have any important advice for your customers?
Technology is revolutionary so you need to look beyond the traditional things. Look what your business vision is and start architecting the network to follow that part. Think beyond what is available.
