Tuesday, January 3, 2012

My 2011 Update and Thoughts on What’s Coming in 2012

An Eventful Year with Many Changes
It’s been an eventful year for me and I thought an update was in order. On the work front there have been a lot of changes. I joined Juniper Networks in November. I’m focused on technical marketing for data center and cloud. This is a return for me as I was at Juniper before moving to Cisco in 2007. It’s interesting how the world turns, and I’m excited to be back.

When I was interviewing at Juniper I was asked what attracted me to the jobs that I had. Of course there are many things, but being a techie what stands out for me is working on market leading products and I’ve been fortunate to have worked on some firsts. At Lucent it was the Portmaster (formerly Livingston), the first digital remote access server. At Redback it was the SMS (Subscriber Management System), the first broadband aggregation platform. At Entone it was a suite of products for IPTV that preceded FIOS and UVerse. When I first went to Juniper in 2005 it was the Peribit WX, the first WAN Optimization devices. At Cisco I got into cloud computing and marketed data center solutions including virtualized network services that ran on the UCS compute platform. At VCE I marketing the first pre-engineered converged infrastructure platform for private cloud computing.

So the question is what brought me to Juniper? Working at a company that continues to innovate in the networking space was a big draw. The opportunity to be on a newly formed team that is focused on critical areas of the network and to be the lead for data center and cloud computing was important. My role in technical marketing is to bridge the gap between the capabilities of the networking equipment and the value delivered to the business in terms of application performance and availability. I believe that the network design is critical to delivering a superior user experience and enabling applications architected for the cloud. As I looked at how applications are becoming more complex and more highly distributed I saw how Juniper’s innovative QFabric switching platform was ideally suited to meet the requirements of this trend in application architecture. So the short answer is the opportunity to market data center solutions based on QFabric.

Here are a few areas of interest that I expect to be writing about in the coming months.