The sweeping influence of cloud computing has spurred a transition in enterprise information technology vending, from being predominantly hardware-based to an increasing focus on software. As more businesses look to the cloud and open-source technology for greater efficiency, partners working to provide support tools are also taking a more community-based approach to transformation.

“We see Tungsten Fabric as … a tool to create a global ubiquitous network fabric that anybody can use anywhere without talking to Juniper at all,” said Randy Bias (pictured), vice president of technology and strategy, cloud software, at Juniper Networks Inc. Juniper Networks has moved Tungsten Fabric (formerly known as OpenContrail) — its open-source network virtualization platform for cloud — to the Linux Foundation.

Bias spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. They discussed the journey of Juniper’s platform and where cloud and open source will go next.

Reinvigorating the cloud community

OpenContrail officially became Tungsten Fabric at the end of March, following an effort spearheaded by Bias that aimed to concentrate Juniper’s mission on creating greater access for the developer community at large.

“We needed to … transition it from being Juniper-led to community-led. … Now … we’re moving forward with a new reinvigorated community,” he said.

While the architectural decisions and testing infrastructure were owned by Juniper, the Linux Foundation provided the legal framework for the trademarks, code and contributor license agreements that Juniper needed to ensure solid governance structure. “We renamed it, moved it into the Linux foundation … and now Juniper is one of many people of the community that have a seat at the table for the management, both from a business and technical perspective,” Bias said.

With the rapid pace of cloud expansion, technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are what will continue to expedite advancements in the space, according to Bias. “The next level is … fully automated applications driving themselves. … Maybe we start to remove the traditional operator out of the equation … empowering developers with tools that are comfortable and that leverage all the cloud era stuff that we built,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit.

Photo: SiliconANGLE