In their ongoing coverage of VMworld 2013, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman spoke with both Denise Shiffman, Vice President, Product Management and Strategy at Juniper Networks and Hatem Naguib, Vice President, Networking and Security at VMware. The three discuss Juniper’s unique offerings and their integration with VMware.

Naguib shares his enthusiasm for VMware’s new NSX offering, with which Juniper integrates. He says that “it’s really predicated on being able to deliver for any application,” offering the core components of networking. Shiffman explains that Juniper’s integration with NSX offers a high level of visibility as “NSX can programmatically provision the entire data infrastructure.” What is unique about Juniper’s offering is that it uniquely provides that integration at the core level of the network, allowing for flexibility.

Shiffman suggests what is special about the offering is that users can “correlate what’s happening on the underlay.” More specifically, both the system administrator and operator are able to see what occurs and can diagnose and troubleshoot; Shiffman adds, “VMware wants to make sure that happens.”

Miniman asks Shiffman about common challenges she has seen in the enterprise space. Shiffman says scaling out and building infrastructure poses certain problems. She notes that there are many reasons why customers may want to upgrade within IT. As customers upgrade, Juniper aims to help “route across segments and data centers and bring the flexibility our customers are asking for to create that environment.” When it comes to the future of the network team, Shiffman says the aim is to help the network manager manage the infrastructure. More specifically, Juniper makes it easy for a system administrator to see what’s happening across the infrastructure and correlate processes between the physical infrastructure and the cloud environment.

Naguib has noticed that clients are mainly concerned with switching, routing, firewall and load balancing. Naguib notes that what VMware delivers in the space is unique in terms of the depth of virtuality and services saying “there’s an enormous amount of extensibility.” He says, “we look at the core functionality we can provide and where can we bring in the differentiated value and do the automated configuration through that integration.”

Shiffman adds that Juniper has “really shown how you can converge storage and the main data center network. This takes it to the next step and shows how well we understand going from the next compute to the next storage; virtualized storage.”