Glad he’s out. He was the wrong guy for the job. Knew nothing about hardware, thought the whole world was google and had as much charisma as a pile of wet laundry. RR can sure pick the hires. The best people!
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Whitebox is indeed part of the industry but it’s not the whole story. If you are buying 20k switches a month and you need to shave a nickel off each one, and they are deployed like an assembly line, then sure whitebox makes a lot of sense. For the rest of the industry, not so much.
The larger trend is the web guys and not the telcos are directing the SP industry now. The web/cloud guys want whitebox yes but also, and more lucrative, very high end routing hardware and lots of it. There aren’t many players that can make a go of this. JNPR by punting on custom asics is admitting it cannot compete anymore, so is just becoming another Broadcom integrator. It takes capital to invest in silicon and J doesn’t have it or won’t risk it. CSCO and NOK have new custom asics that appeal very strongly at the high end for web, and across SP as well. And those guys have the body armor, and diverse lines of business, to survive whatever current uncertainty exists.
For all the greatness of Juniper – JunOS, the best MPLS implementation bar none, disciplined technology adherence, focus on high end, and yes, historic silicon technology, reality is the company hasn’t taken risk in the right places and is paying the price for it now.
Here is the fundamental problem of all the legacy networking companies. The workload is moving out of the enterprise and into the cloud. The cloud titans are building their own whitebox hardware. They aren't interested to pay Cisco, Juniper, Arista for something they can make for themselves.
Although Telecom and Enterprise still buy, the major dollars are in the cloud now. I'm guessing BK was brought in there to try and get big sales into Google. That's why I would hire him. Then he probably had no chance to get anything sold into Google or any of the other cloud titans. And they probably didn't listen to him about what kind of products that they might buy that they can't do for themselves yet.
It's game over for some of these folks. Look what happened to the superstar Arista Networks. It's just another company that the cloud titans don't want to have to buy their gear and are working hard to design them out. The only reason to buy Arista, Juniper, Cisco for the cloud is the big aggregation switches based on Jericho or custom ASIC.
It's amazing what the whitebox has done to decimate the networking companies. Combined with the move to the megascale datacenter, the writing is on the wall. All these companies can't survive this dramatic change in compute workloads and networking. The company that benefits is Broadcom.
Any reason why BK left ? Did he resign or he was fired ?
Some had already mentioned BK’s departure 2 months ago, so it was well know within the CEO staff circle. OP below
CTO & CPO are not playing nice
Folks, there's some new well, not so new drama in the ivory tower. The CTO & CPO are at war with each other, can't come to an agreement on product strategy. Seeing the 2 of them go at it, is like watching a scene in game of thrones or more like the office
Departure of CTO is estimated to be by the end of this year maybe sooner
MJGA SOS
2 months ago by Anonymous
15 replies (last a day ago)
2449 views | 1 reaction (+1/-0)
Post ID: @11sDZgPR
The fact that replacement CTO has been announced means that this was not an abrupt resignation? Any chance BK was fired?
RR should resign or BoD should kick him out. BK's exit is well planned. By downgrading to VP and joining Google, he confessed that he failed as CTO. The only question, how the new CTO hired without Juniper announced that they are in search of a new CTO. The new CTO also looks irrelavant, may be he is next a$$ licker for RR.
Way to go RR, keep that C-Suite door revolving.
Anyone that is worth anything has left the company, the ones still their can't find anything or is s—ing the company dry.
What a disaster, who will make Juniper great again? Or is it too late?
The revolving door was a great career move for BK. He was at a terminal DE position at Google. He takes a CTO spot and makes millions then goes back to GOOG as a VP with a fat package. No doubt the new CTO will use the same revolving door to catapult his career while offering zero value to Juniper.
BTW, Juniper chose to release the news about the CTO resignation the day before Thanksgiving to minimize attention. If the new CTO was a positive for Juniper the company would not take such measures to try to hide the news.
But someone on LR said that customers loved hearing his perspective and his Google experience. Seriously what did BK do for his millions? Has anything new come out of Juniper in the last few years?
Another Googler, Raj Yavalkar from Google Cloud is getting BK's job: https://www.lightreading.com/optical-ip/koley-quits-as-junipers-cto/d/d-id/756001
Good thing is, I hear some of the useless fat in EMEA has been made to resign as well, especially in Italian sector.
https://wallmine.com/people/49293/bikash-koley
$8,763,210 as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Networks.
BK is out??