TORONTO—Rami Rahim has been on the job as the CEO of networking vendor Juniper for the last six months, and in that time, he’s helped his company focus on the things that will help drive the business forward. Rahim delivered a keynote address at the Canadian Telecom Summit here today about the opportunities for telcos in the modern era of network automation and the cloud.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Rahim discusses what he talked about at the Canadian Telecom Summit and why the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is core to his company’s strategy for enabling service providers.
A key component in Juniper’s portfolio is its open-source Contrail software-defined networking (SDN) controller that provides the ability to get services up and running rapidly. Juniper is positioning Contrail as the premier network virtualization technology for the OpenStack cloud platform.
“We’re out to make Contrail the very best networking stack for OpenStack. That’s our mission. That’s our goal,” Rahim said. “Many of our customers that believe in OpenStack like the open-source nature of OpenStack, as it gives them options and it gives them flexibility.”
From a business perspective, OpenStack is also helping to serve as a driver of future business opportunities for Juniper. While it’s still early in terms of actual revenue for Juniper’s OpenStack efforts, Rahim is optimistic about the direction he has already seen.
“In terms of where the conversations are occurring today, the proof-of-concept labs that are being developed and the opportunities that will drive revenues in the future, [OpenStack is] a huge component of the conversation we’re having with our customers,” Rahim said. “As all our customers in cable, telco, financial services and government move toward cloud delivery architectures, they will move toward automation and orchestration through OpenStack or VMware.”
Watch the full video interview with Juniper CEO, Rami Rahim below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.