The tech world has seen many changes in recent years, but one that too often goes unnoticed is that hardware and software are moving apart. It used to be that a company bought its systems from one vendor, ran that vendor’s applications and used that vendor’s services. Now, a business might build its stack from a dozen different sources. Breaking away from one-vendor solutions is the point of disaggregation, and the benefits can be great.

To shed some light on the disaggregation strategy, John Furrier and Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down with Jonathan Davidson at the Juniper Networks NXTWORK 2015 conference. Davidson is the executive VP and GM of Development and Innovation at Juniper Networks, Inc.

End of an era

The discussion started off with a thought about the end of the client-server era. Davidson spoke about Juniper’s strategy for disaggregation. “We believe we are in the business of connectivity,” he said. The market, he explained, no longer wanted hardware and software to be so tightly coupled together. It all comes down to agility.

He continued, describing how from Juniper’s perspective, there’s a technology transformation, but also a business transformation. Customers want to be able to deploy Juniper’s products on any system, he said, but enabling that requires a change in how business does things.

Matching market trends

Certain classes of customers have their own integration teams and a different level of expectations than companies with smaller IT departments, Davidson said. A smaller company probably wants a turnkey solution, but if the customer wants to build their own system, they should be able to do that.

Things come down, Davidson said, to customers who own their applications and customers who buy their applications. How a business buys their network infrastructure depends on the applications they need to run. The ownership of apps controls everything about how networks are built and leads to different expectations about what the company’s tech people can do.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Juniper Networks NXTWORK 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE