Rami Rahim on Digital Cohesion

I'm constantly amazed at the technology all around us that we experience in our day-to-day lives – from my fitness app and activity tracker that tell me to get off the couch to my house that locks itself when I head off to work in the morning. For those of you that think it can’t get any better or more interesting, you’re wrong. There are unstoppable forces and technology and economics combining to bring us a new era of convenience, knowledge and empowerment. Let me give you an example. Studies show that experiential learning is more effective than traditional classrooms. Imagine a bored child in a supermarket who dons augmented reality glasses and is instantly presented with a game that combines everything about her – learning level, curriculum – and around her – locations, store sensors and data. It asks her to put together a well-balanced meal, for 50 dollars. And she will be rewarded a hundred game points if successful. Without even knowing it, she’s learning maths, nutrition and decision-making skills. This truly immersive learning experience is coming sooner than you think. We at Juniper call this new era “Digital Cohesion”. A future in which applications connect and seemingly self-assemble to deliver compelling mega-services that enhance our lives. It is about a future in which applications are autonomous and predictive and adaptive. A future in which technology works in the background automatically and continuously adapting to you. It eliminates mundane tasks and decision making, freeing up that invaluable resource: time. This future is coming fast and the technology barriers, although great, are not insurmountable. To achieve the performance needed by Digital Cohesion era apps, a new level of network innovation will be necessary in overcoming the end of Moore’s law. An increasing number of networking use cases will need to be solved using scale-out architectures. And the trick will be to enable this trend while also keeping complexity in check. We, as an industry, cannot achieve breakthroughs in network economics without interoperability. Interoperability has always been important, and will only get more important, in the Digital Cohesion era. Openness will be required throughout the stack from the application layer on down. We have proven we can do this at the IP layer but we have work to do to achieve the same level of interoperability at just one layer below: the optical layer. The technology innovation behind providing these services requires resources that are currently tied up in legacy work, in keeping the lights on. Freeing up capacity for new work will require automation. Automation not only shifts network personnel into more strategic work, it also results in a much more efficient and reliable network. Many of you have heard me say this before and I’ll say it again: automation is the next big thing in networking, and the foundation of what we at Juniper call a Self-Driving Network. The adoption of Digital Cohesion will rely on a higher level of trust that requires a new approach to network security. Software-Defined Secured Networks have security built into every network element, providing superior protection from threats inside and outside the network. SDSN flips unknown threats into known threats and uses automation to make known threats as widely known as possible, and as quickly as possible, by all elements of the network. The future is exciting and we cannot let technology barriers deter us. In fact, we have solutions that yield immediate benefits for our customers today. I hope that you join us in helping enable this new world where technology disappears into the fabric of our lives, making us more productive, healthier, and enjoying life to the fullest.