Okay. Thank you very much for joining me. We're gonna in the next presentation, we're hosting the most exciting part of Juniper, and we talk about think about Mist and Mistifying, and basically take how AI is impacting networking. We're gonna talk about all this. Before I start, and before I present anyone, you have a few things to say? Just quickly, we may be making forward-looking statements. Those statements come with risks and uncertainties. You could read about those risks in our SEC filings on our IR website. Perfect. What he's really saying is, Sujal, just please think before you say. Sujal, you are EVP of AI-Driven Enterprise. Would you mind just to present yourself before we start, so to those of you that don't know you? Absolutely. I run the enterprise business at Juniper, more specifically focused on Wi-Fi, switching, and routing, and came to Juniper as a part of an acquisition of a company I founded called Mist, which got acquired by Juniper in 2019. Founded Mist in 2014, 2015. Before that, ran the enterprise business at Cisco. Yeah. I've been pretty much in this networking space for a long time. Got it. Great. I'm gonna go a little bit off script just because, I know what you've done. How did you have the guts to develop another Wi-Fi company in a very crowded Wi-Fi space, and still find way to innovate? What did you think that you're bringing to the market that did not exist with other Wi-Fi companies? That's a great question, Tal. I'll just make it personal, and then I'll get into the actual story. True story, believe it or not, I came home. I told my daughter, who actually now works in San Francisco, that, "Hey, I'm thinking of starting yet another Wi-Fi company." She's like: "Dad, really? Yet another Wi-Fi company?" Why did it happen? There was actually an aha moment. I was at Cisco at that point in time, and we had just sold a huge network refresh to one of the most well-known retailers. I'm sure many of you have shopped there. When we did that, we were having a dinner with the CIO, and he asked us: "Hey, I've just put in north of $35 million-$40 million in this network. How do I know that on Monday, when my, you know, staff walks in or my employee walks in, he or she will get a good experience on the network? What do we say? We said, "We actually don't." He says: "Isn't it funny? I just put north of $35 million to improve user experience, and you can't tell me that." That is what led to, believe it or not, the genesis of Mist. Our focus was, while all the networks out there from, you know, our peers in the industry, were focused on making sure that the network was working fine, our focus was, is your experience on the network good or not? It changed from the network to the user, and hence, the philosophy of end user experience. That's what started Mist, and thank you for all the rewards which the industry has given to us. What are the opportunities? When you talk about AI-Driven Enterprise, what kind of opportunities do you see that you target with this segment? Fundamentally, you know, the appeal for our product line, which was fundamentally based on two critical architectural pillars, which was a cloud-native or a microservices-based network, which was unique in the networking industry. No one had attempted it before. When we were looking at Facebook, Netflix. You know, does Netflix stop working when you change your recommendation? It does not. It automatically just works. We started looking at the microservices architecture to really make sure that we can make the network adapt to the business needs. One of the most critical business needs was, you know, if you look at it from a network, it's a very boring space, if you think about it, but it's actually the most important. Without the network, you cannot connect. What we had to do was make sure that we could reduce the operating cost of the network. We used the microservices cloud, which was unique to us, and AI-driven capabilities, which was extremely critical, to come out with a network which not only gave you exposure to how the user is doing, but at the same time, for IT, reduced the cost of ownership to the level that at MIT, when they deployed our network, the CIO said, as if someone turned on the lights on the network. For the first time, they could see what was going on. ServiceNow, one of our full stack, we call it full stack because they have Wi-Fi, wired, and SD-WAN. They clearly said the number of tickets being generated in the enterprise went down by 90%. Gap, as a retailer, many of you know, including their five other brands, they reduced their number, or the number of store visits went down by 76%. If you think about it, Tal, what we were all about was going and driving a business outcome. We were not selling you an access point or a switch or a router. What we were basically selling you is, I can fundamentally reduce the operating cost of your network and give your user an experience they have not had before. I'll just say one last thing. You know, we as human beings, if the network doesn't work, we can complain. When a robot has a problem on the network, the robot doesn't complain. It just stops working. When it stops working, the five robots around it stop working, and then 50 around it stop working. What does that result into? Your manufacturing floor is down or your fulfillment center is down. If you start looking at it, you need to have a network. Experience is critical. Network operation costs being low is paramount. Last but not the least, the most important is drive the business outcome, which aligns with what that business wants to do. That is what we do at Juniper Mist. Tal, you talked about opportunity. If you look at the wired, wireless, SD-WAN, networking opportunity in aggregate, it's roughly a $30 billion TAM. Yes. We have a highly differentiated solution. We've been seeing strong market success, but we're still a small player in the market, so lots of opportunity to take share. Right. What does this mean, Mistifying? You talk about Mistifying as a verb. Yes. What does it mean, Mistifying switches, Mistifying security? It's definitely not sending my photograph with every unit we ship. What it is fundamentally all about is, if a product is Mistified, the customer straight away knows there are three things which are happening. Number one, zero-touch provisioning. You can literally take anything, plug it into ethernet, and that's all you need to do. Everything is configured. Where some of our customers were taking months to years to deploy the network, we do it in days to weeks. That is one of our key. Day 0, we take it down. The next part is about day one, like configuration. You don't have to deploy anything with Mist, and customers know everything will be auto-configured. You just tell it the intent. Last but not the least, is day two to day 365, which is the operations of the network. When we talk about Mistification, customers know that literally believe it or not, the ordering process would be simple. What we do is, when an access point or a switch or a router is born in our factory, it's automatically updated in the cloud database. Automatically. When a customer goes and orders, automatically, the trust relationship is established with the customer. Before customers even seeing the things coming to their docks, they actually know, "Hey, this is my inventory, and this is mine." The whole experience of day zero, day one, day two, is Mistification. What does that lead to? I'll give you a very simple example. Our model, which you started seeing, is bearing fruit, is if I sell $1 of Wi-Fi, I sell anywhere from $2-$3 of switching on top of it. I sell anywhere from $0.50-$1 on SD-WAN, because SD-WAN, you sell only a couple of routers per branch. When you start looking at this opportunity, why Mistification is so important, that verb is so important, is ServiceNow started with Wi-Fi, saw the promise of Wi-Fi, went to wired, saw the promise of wired, went to SD-WAN. This Mistification is creating a huge upsell capability for Juniper, and that is why we get excited about it. How do you address the switching market and campus switches, particularly, companies have Cisco mostly, maybe a little bit of Juniper, maybe a little bit of Arista, but mostly Cisco in this market. What do you bring to the market that convinces them to switch to you, and what else do you need to do in order to gain market share even faster? That's a great question. See, generally what will happen is, you will go in and give a pitch, and believe it or not, it's happened to me so many times. The customer will say, "Hey, Cisco was just here," whether it's JD or whoever was just here, and it was the same pitch. Yeah. You know, because it's easy to copy the slides, right? ChatGPT still cannot write the full code for all of us. The fun part is, that is where, which is critical for us, we request, and this is our selling motion, we request for a proof of concept. A customer, more often than not, when they go for a proof of concept, nine out of 10 times we win. What is it that they see in a proof of concept, to your question? They fundamentally are able to see how the cloud-native architecture is working. For example, normally a switch, you know, to make it very simple, when you're connected to the Wi-Fi right now, it goes to an access point, that goes to a switch, and that goes to a router. This is the chain. A switch, if it is down and it has to be upgraded, it can take 5-6 minutes to boot up. Can you imagine you waiting for five minutes to connect to the network? I mean, you'd move on by then. Guess what? A very simple example, a Mistified switch takes less than 2-3 minutes. An access point which takes three minutes in the market, takes 17 seconds at Mist. Fundamentally, the whole thought process is, when the customer starts seeing this and I'm saying they see I get a highly reliable network, highly operational network, my users have never been happy, because one of the most common things you will hear on a Juniper Mist network. You can go to LinkedIn, you can literally, and maybe some of your firms have Mist Juniper. Hopefully, they have seen the light. If they have not, talk to them about it. The key part is, you go and talk to them and say, "You know what, Tal? I deployed the network and it just worked." That is the self-assisted part, which I haven't spoken about, which is critical to us. We just make the network work. What are the other sides? Meaning those customers who are not convinced, what are the points that why are they staying on Cisco or others? Fundamentally, if you look at it, you know, we hear it, frankly, we think we've been able to counter it. You hear it more and more, but before it was, you never get fired for buying IBM. Yeah. It is you never get fired for buying Cisco. More and more, what's happening is, if COVID showed something, the business outcomes became important, the timelines became important, agility became important. Now more and more customers are coming and saying: Is there a different way to do it, right? Juniper is a brand. It's not a, you know, it's not a small startup somewhere, which may or may not be there a few years later. We get that shot... The key part, Tal, is we insist on a proof of concept. As soon as the customer sees the proof of concept, they see the light. If you were to say, why the incumbency stays, it's fundamentally because it's the safe choice. Having said that, I won't disclose the name, but I'll anonymize it. One of the top financial institutions in the world has just made a decision on Juniper six months back. For years, you could go and talk to the IT team, they'll say, "The answer is Cisco. What's the question?" They made a change. What caused them to make the change? Fundamentally, they ran a pilot and saw the difference in the operations cost. Mm-hmm. The Cisco network, compared to the Mist Juniper network, was going to cost them. They already were running the Cisco network. They ran it at a small, production scale with Juniper. They felt that the Juniper network would pay for itself in less than three years. Mm-hmm. We are talking about a large global enterprise. One of the largest healthcare systems in the world just made the switch from Cisco to Juniper. UMass Amherst, one of the, like, the bellwether customers for HPE Aruba, made the switch from Aruba to Juniper. You ask them, the common theme would be very simply: this AI stuff is actually real. It actually works, so. Got it. I should have started with this question, but I'm gonna ask it now because it's important for the rest of the discussion. What's included in your portfolio? What's included in the AI-Driven Enterprise? At the highest level, we clearly say it's Wi-Fi, wireless LAN access points, which is close to a $6 billion-$8 billion TAM, if you include everything. In Wi-Fi, we focus more and more only on the cloud part, because that part is growing a lot faster, and it is probably already crossed $2 billion-$3 billion of TAM. Next is Ethernet switching, and there we focus on the managed part, and that switching business is anywhere between $16 billion-$18 billion in TAM, based on who you, whose reports you look at. Last but not the least is SD-WAN, which is optimized routing, which is more and more getting combined with cloud security, and you will hear the buzzword SASE a lot. Yeah. We fundamentally go from, we connect you on Wi-Fi, push your packets on switching, route it to a Zoom or a Teams on routing, and secure it right across from client to cloud. That is what our portfolio is. Right. How is it, synergistic... you just said it, but how is it synergistic to your security portfolio? Absolutely. Before, if you look at it, security was all about firewalls. It was more perimeter security. What started happening more and more, as the workspaces moved more and more to the cloud, that was not... You know, people said, "What could be done with security?" You had companies such as Zscaler, Netskope, you know, of course, there's Cisco and Palo Alto, including Juniper, started looking at transitioning to the cloud. Some were pure-play cloud companies, such as, I mean, Zscaler. If you look at the approach Juniper took, is we are fundamentally, we fundamentally feel networking and security is coming together. It may be a bias because we are a networking player and we are a security player, but we fundamentally feel these two are coming together. We have already introduced our ability to have cloud security through our SASE offering. We also have been very strong about partnerships with companies such as Zscaler. You can buy a Juniper product today, and you can get onboarded onto a Zscaler or a Netskope if you want it. Here comes the most important part. From our perspective, you will see a new change coming more and more in the industry. A lot of people have heard about Zero Trust. Zero Trust is not really a product, it's an architecture. We feel that as Juniper, with the whole mystification because of cloud, we are in a unique place to take advantage of a Zero Trust network architecture. Our phase one, we just announced a product called a Cloud NAC. It's Mist Access Assurance. The NAC market, network admission control, decides whether you can connect to a network or not. It's a security product. That market, Tal, you'd be surprised. There are only three real serious players in the market, and they've been in that market for over 15 years with that product unchanged. We have just introduced the Cloud NAC, which makes all the complexity go away, and that is our phase one of going into network and security coming together. Got it. When I look at your numbers, the Mistified revenue run rate, you disclosed it grew 60% in the last quarter to $160 million. What drives this growth? I think the product is just amazingly awesome. If you- That's a very unbiased view. Give me the objective answer. I think the objective answer is, more and more, people are saying that a Juniper network definitely reduces the cost of ownership because the philosophy is different. Yeah. For us, a network being up is not the same as Tal's experience being good. Just these simple terms, when people say they are manifesting, we are seeing that happen. There is a lift. The lift is coming from word of mouth. Like, when at MIT, when at Dartmouth is where the term AI was coined in 1956. When these institutions, prestigious Oxford, when they make this decision, word spreads. I mean, I'm not kidding. In the U.K., Oxford and other education institution we closed, we had 12 other name brand institutions close within three months. First of all, you know, we go in with beachhead accounts, which we definitely want to win. The word of mouth spreads, how does it scale? The second way is, if you look at Gartner's Magic Quadrant, they have defined us as topmost on vision and execution, the leader of leaders, way ahead of Cisco, ahead of Aruba, ahead of anybody in that. Guess what happens? There's word of mouth. Procurement looks at the Gartner MQ, including, for example, Bank of America IT, and they'll say, "Hey, who's this? Let's invite them in. Mm-hmm. Last but not the least is our go-to-market. We've focused a lot. I mean, if you looked at eight years back, if I came and asked you honest opinion, what do you say about Juniper? You'll say it's a service provider company. 40% of our business at Juniper is now coming from enterprise, and partners have a lot to do with it. We have fundamentally transformed our go-to-market, which allows us to go into the commercial space, which, you know, we grew, like, 30% last quarter, if I'm not mistaken. Commercial Q1 grew 40%. 40%, sorry. Right? You will see what's fundamentally happening is the product market fit has been achieved by winning the beachheads, and the scale has started, which is why you're seeing this amazing growth. Got it. You even answered my next question, so that's good. I got two for one. It's about the go-to-market strategy. What's your competition doing? Well, your success is pretty obvious. The numbers speak for themselves. What's the response of the competition? So you are- Sorry, I'll expand it. Put yourself in their shoes. How easy it is to respond to you? They got big shoes to fill, man. You know, honestly speaking, they're very respectable companies. The peer group in networking, first of all, we pretty much know each other, and they're very respectable companies. Here's. Each of them have their own challenge, which is what is an opportunity for us. If you look at Cisco. Cisco, I was there at Cisco in 2010 when we acquired Meraki. Cisco has a big problem trying to sell to customer. Do they sell their traditional offering, or do they sell Meraki? Meraki, by the way, is now 13 years old, and people still think it's cloud. It's gen-1 cloud. Cisco, while they were figuring out what to sell, they forgot what they had to innovate. Cisco Live is starting today or tomorrow in Vegas. Yes. I'm waiting to hear what they say, but I know that they have clearly said that we will now embark on a microservices architecture, the same architecture Mist embarked on in 2015. They're embarking on it eight years back, so that is fundamentally the lead. Cisco, it's gonna take time. They'll have to figure out what they need to do. HPE Aruba, pretty much everybody knows, they just forgot about the cloud. They were so enamored by their success and controller, they forgot about the cloud, their whole architecture, and that's what you're seeing. I mean our wins with Cisco is, of course, a lot just because of their scale. Second, we always, you know, respect Aruba, but winning against them is becoming more and more easier because the market is shifting towards the cloud. Their product is still not fully cloud-ready. Last but not the least, I would say one of the companies I respect, even the CEO, Jayshree, you know, she's a role model for many of us in our community. If you think about it, Arista fundamentally is coming from the data center in, right? That's why we say from core to edge. We are going from edge to core, this is going to be an interesting battle. The only thing which I would say is on enterprise, campus, and branch, on Wi-Fi, unfortunately, they went with a fatigued offering of AirTight, which became Mojo, and that is now they're experiencing is not working out for them. Now they are trying to CloudVision it, you cannot. It's a totally different architecture. I think it's gonna take Arista some time to figure out what they need to do in the campus and branch space. You can't take away-. Mm. the success in data center. I think when I look at all of these three companies, I feel we are in a pretty good position. That is why, you know, just last year, 650 Group, which is one of the analysts, declared us as the fastest growing wireless LAN company in the market. You spoke a lot about cloud. What does it mean? What does it mean that you are playing in the cloud? Is it just the ability to provision and manage the systems? What is the part that is more hardware- Right ... appliance, et cetera. What is the part that makes you unique because you coin it as cloud? This is a great question because this was fundamentally the hallmark of the Mist architecture and now the Juniper architecture. If you look at it, we embarked on something called microservices. Many of you may know what it is, but let me just make it brain dead simple. In general, the way software is built, you have multiple functions: you compile it, you link it's a blob of code, and you put that on an appliance or a switch or whatever. The problem is, when you have this blob of code and you want to make one change in security, you have to upgrade the whole thing again. Imagine if you've got, like, Bank of America, if you've got 8,000 branches and you have to go and upgrade each and every one of them, you're talking about a one-year project on a good day. Yes. Comes the fun part. Let's say there's a security vulnerability. Can you, in a bank, wait for a year for that vulnerability to be taken care of? Guess what customers were doing? They were switching off that service. Imagine I would go into your bank, and I cannot connect to the network, because we have a sec... You will never say I have a security issue, you disable the service. Welcome to the Juniper Mist world. In a microservices architecture, there's no longer a single blob of software. It is mini task workers. Each of them know their job, right? What happens is, when I have a security vulnerability which comes out, I just upgrade that piece of code. Everything runs. Bank of America does not have to bring the network down at all. Mm-hmm. The upgrades happen in service, exactly like a Netflix model. That is critical. The real-timeness, the agility of what we're able to bring. Last but not the least, when new services come in, we were just in a discussion last week where the customer wanted to introduce a totally new service. Literally, in a Mist Juniper environment, it took them less than two days to enable it globally. That's what the cloud microservices architecture does for us. Mm-hmm. We only have a few minutes left. Is there any questions from the audience? No, I can keep going. Good. You spoke about SD-WAN. Talk about the opportunity and also speak about the competition, because Cisco is playing there, even Fortinet is playing there. What's your angle? At SD-WAN, you know, I took a pretty bold move because at Juniper, I was not an insider. Like, I joined Juniper as a part of an acquisition. You know, it's good that, you know, they allowed me to run the AI-Driven Enterprise business for Juniper. When I came in there, Juniper already had an SD-WAN portfolio called CSO, and it was service providers like Vodafone and all, were having a good time with it. Fundamentally, when we looked at it and we said, "Is this a Mistification? Can I Mistify it?" We found out that it's tough to do it. It is too heavy. We made a bold move to go out and actually acquire a company called 128. These were ex-Acme Packet guys, Andy Ory and Patrick MeLampy. The only reason we did that was because in the SD-WAN from 128, you could literally figure out that this is your session. Guess what? For the first time in the industry, if you're having a problem on Zoom, I could say, "Yes, you're having a problem on Zoom, and it is because of Wi-Fi or switching or routing," unique to us, okay? We deprecated CSO, brought in 128, fully Mistified it, and ServiceNow and Seagate were the initial customers. Mm. Looking at this SD-WAN. Where we feel we are different is the same concept of user. Most of the SD-WANs, you know, Cisco, if you look at, was ISR, then it was Viptela. You know, they had an unfortunate incident with Viptela, but you really cannot blame Cisco for that. Those things happen. If you look at Viptela, it's gen one, like Juniper CSO, like VeloCloud from Broadcom, and only time will tell what exactly happens to that asset. I don't know whether Hawk spoke about it. Yeah. Now, you look at 128 from Juniper, it's gen 2. Why? Because it shows the user connection from client to cloud. Apart from 128 for SD-WAN, we are now integrating it, of course, with the security, cloud security. We also acquired another company called WiteSand. WiteSand, many of you may not know, was founded by a person called Praveen Jain, who was one of the key founders of, if you have ever heard of ACI, Application Centric Infrastructure from Cisco. Mm. He used to work for Praveen Jain. He started WiteSand, and we, as Juniper, were early enough to recognize what that team was doing. They were building the Cloud NAC. We actually acquired, before they became billions of dollars, we acquired them, Mistified it. Now you have a full offering of Wi-Fi switching, differentiated SD-WAN, with access control by MAC. Got it. Great. We only have a minute left. What's your biggest challenge now? Is it on technology or is it go to market and ramp your sales? I think it's as simple as that. It's about coverage. I need to be able to cover as quickly as possible, as much as I can. I sincerely feel, for me, if you look at our share, it's in single digits, right? If you look at the Gartner MQ, if you look at our rate of growth, you would say, "That doesn't make sense." That means it's all about coverage. We have started transforming our go-to market, and I expect a lot of upside coming for us. When people talk about the enterprise macro conditions, my take on this is the true demand continues to be extremely strong for us, and that is what excites me. Got it. Great. Okay. Thank you, Sujal. Thank you, Tal. Thanks. Have a good one. It was a great discussion.