Shaygan Kheradpir took the stage in his first appearance as Juniper’s CEO to lay out his vision for the company heading into 2014.
Speaking at Juniper’s annual Global Partner Conference, Rev Up in Las Vegas, Kheradpir told attendees that the company will be focusing on its key strengths, its customer relationships (through its channel partners), innovation and the excellence of execution.
Kheradpir started as CEO on January 1, and as such hasn’t had much time to put his stamp on the company. He replaced Juniper CEO of five years, Kevin Johnson.
Kheradpir left Barclays Bank in November of last year, where he was COO and CTO. He was also one of the early executive members of US telco giant, Verizon, where he served as EVP and CIO/CTO.
He also has a degree in eletrical engineering from Cornell University.
This combined background, he says, gives him a unique insight into the industry, from both sides of the fence. As such, he says that he wants to make Juniper ‘dramatically better, not a little better’.
As well as the aforementioned focus on customer relations through the channel, he wants the company to produce a ‘disciplined focus on fundamentals’ a key lesson he learned when streamlining Barclay’s tangled IT operations.
Market pressures from the endless treadmill of innovation often means it is hard to keep up with new trends. But some of the key points to focus on in the new IT environment is matching customer imperatives, which he says is a new market paradigm. Networking has become too bogged down in selling hardware and technology, rather than selling uniquely crafted solutions that suit the end user.
Another bold statement he made is that partners, and their clients, need to know when to let go of the status quo.
“Just don’t drag that legacy stuff to the future with you,” he said.
Kheradpir believes that for networking to take the big jump into the software defined networks (SDN) future, hardware centric ways of thinking have to be left behind. There will be massive opportunities made available to those that are willing to take the risk.
The development of ‘High IQ’ (or intelligent) networks combined with the exponential growth of Cloud ecosystems means that networking is now more important – and harder – to pull off. “These networks can never go down,” he said.
In the superconnected future, where health services and every other public service is provided via networks and the cloud, Kheradpir notes that a network outage could literally put lives in danger.
He described this new networked future as being part of Juniper’s DNA, and these new High IQ, hybrid Cloud networks will have to be hackproof, vertically and horizontally scalable, multi-tenanted, context aware and able to be adjusted in real time.
As part of this, partners will have to be willing to work at the customer’s pace, not forcing them into any positions that might rush them or put pressure on them. As such, he believes that Juniper’s 2014 will be defined by a laser like focus on its customers – and as such the company will be redeveloping its field organizations to liaise better.
He will restore Juniper’s focus on leading edge innovation, rebuild the ‘get it done’ culture of its partner relationships and finally to ‘execute without excuses’.
Allan Swann flew to Rev-Up as a guest of Juniper Networks.
