CXO Spice: AI Networks and Higher Ed with Mike Newcomb

Introduction

0:00 [Music] [Applause] hello everyone welcome to cxo spice cxo

0:09 spice is a platform for salt leaders to share their point of view on Innovation and explain how to make it happen in

0:16 real world today's topic is AI networks and higher ed our special guest today is

0:23 Mike Newcomb had a higher ad and Gem as Government education and medical at

0:31 Juniper Networks hello Mike welcome to cxo spies

0:37 thank you Helen thank you for having me I appreciate it tell us more about yourself and your role at Juniper

0:43 Networks yeah I I get the privilege of leading the higher education vertical

0:49 for Juniper Networks and it's it's a it's a nice position because it's more

0:55 from a Consulting standpoint they took advantage they actually recruited me because I Not only was I deep into

1:01 Network in my career I mean I was I go back to digital Equipment Corporation in Burroughs uh and I've been in networking

1:09 forever but at the same time I've also managed to be an adjunct professor for over 40 years so one of the neat things

1:16 about being in this role is I can really talk to thought leaders that really want to understand from both sides of the

1:23 of the chair if you will right so not only is a user that has to to use its

1:28 own equipment but also on the other side so that's that's my my background I've

1:33 had a lot of good experience throughout my career working as a VP at ATT where I

1:39 ran their government education medical program uh at Nortel and places like

1:44 that so yeah glad to be here on the show and we're ready to talk about anything you'd like to speak about melon wow so

Key takeaways from Juniper Education Summit

1:50 that's wonderful to have you Mike um so I really enjoy the recent Juniper

1:56 education Summit what's your key takeaways from The Summit

2:01 yeah you know the biggest thing that I that I saw and I was glad that we talked about during the summit was that there

2:08 has been radical change not just radical change from the standpoint of oh gosh something's got a new feature but

2:14 actually a true paradigm shift in networking has taken place and this started in 2018 if you will but it has

2:21 really changed the way people need to look at networking uh it's an exciting time here at Juniper because we are

2:27 unique in what we offer in terms of how we do what we're doing as much as you'd like to see how other folks are saying

2:34 well I've got this or I've got AI or whatever there's a big difference and and I can feel it and not only just in

2:40 my 40 Years of networking seeing a difference in how networks were architected it was it versus how uh

2:47 where they need to go and for me that's the biggest takeaway is that there's

2:52 been such radical change a paradigm shift in networking that has taken place that makes a significant difference in

2:59 how people need to look at networking yeah that's really well said oh my so

How Juniper is making a difference in shaping educational experiences through AI

3:04 it's really interesting how the idea of AI driven campus seems to be a Hot Topic

3:10 among universities I'm curious what exactly is the role that AI networks

3:15 play on today's college and university campuses and speaking of that have you

3:21 come across any insights from customers about how Juniper is making a difference

3:26 in shaping educational experiences through AI sure yeah I can talk a little

3:32 bit about the the use cases that we've had where people just love what we've done with AI you know our implementation

3:40 uh really started you know 2018 before so think about this when you're talking

3:46 about AI there's a lot of people out there today that say they've got Ai and they're going to have it next week and

3:53 there's a big difference between having something that has had machine learning crunching petabytes of data since 2018

4:00 to create this new paradigm shift it really started around the fact that when

4:05 the architecture was being conceived of how we're going to blow things up and how we're going to

4:10 make things more usable and reduce the operational costs using AI it really

4:16 does come down to the fact that you don't focus on equipment I think that's

4:22 kind of an interesting way of putting it right we don't try to focus on uh you know this switch or this access point or

4:28 whatever it's really about how is Helen your experience on the network I don't

4:34 care what goes behind it I care that Helen had a good experience the weather we're on this call here on Zoom call and

4:40 let's say that something starts to happen and there is you know and again this comes from a teaching perspective

4:47 in my case where you know you're having a zoom call with your students and then something goes on that you go what's

4:53 going on my students can't hear me I don't understand it uh maybe perhaps I was teaching from home today because I'm

5:00 a hybrid instructor or Professor you say how what what what's the problem and

5:06 you've got the I.T departments that usually when any little problem comes up they have to go in and start looking at

5:13 equipment oh it's this is the light on here can I drag the poor person can I try to replicate it there's this all

5:20 these things that come up with it and that's because that was a way that networks were always

5:26 taken care of right you you have equipment you fix it it's supposed to say you know what I had a zoom

5:32 experience that was bad my students didn't enjoy it what was the problem and to be able to quickly understand that AI

5:39 knowing what's going on in your network because again of all the work that's been done in the last you know four five

5:46 eight years uh that all that work that has been done to say I can recognize that the problem that I had when I was

5:52 teaching my class was that during the time I was sitting there trying to deliver my uh my instructional uh

6:01 capabilities to my students it turned out that at the same time I had one of my kids running Netflix and Amazon Prime

6:08 selling things or downloading PlayStation things and it was all happening at the same time which was

6:16 causing my DNS server for example to be overloaded and so there was no way I was going to have that bandwidth and so to

6:22 be able to know that immediately versus I don't know what's wrong with it what were you doing at the time asking them a million questions hoping they can figure

6:28 it out you know or saying hey here's some things you might want to look at to be able to know with a with a with a great

6:35 deal of capability and certainty that the problem happened because my DNS server was overloaded and that AI would

6:43 recognize that that was an issue or a problem again it's about experience it could be

6:49 something as simple as going from uh one building to another you know I'm on campus and I'm going for one building to

6:55 another and suddenly I get the blue circle of death and usually what does this student or a faculty member say oh

7:02 the Wi-Fi stinks here it's no good and it and again that's an open-ended question that usually relates to a long

7:10 set of trouble ticketing efforts that are used to kind of take and and you

7:16 know to try to diagnose the issue as opposed to being able to quickly recognize before they even know that oh

7:23 here's the problem you got your problem going from building a to Building B because maybe there was a missing VLAN

7:28 on the switch and the and the AI engine said hey did you know that Helen had a problem going here she had a bad

7:35 experience that was related because of a missing VLAN here it is here you want me to fix it with a button or it's a bad

7:40 cable that's on a switch I mean these are all things again you're sitting at you're sitting from a help desk

7:46 standpoint you already know before anybody else does that there's an issue going on so you know from when you when

7:53 you think about the most important things that go on on a campus it is about reliability and the student

7:59 experience but it's also faculty and to be able to utilize AI

8:05 to be able to help you quickly diagnose problems because operational AI requires

8:12 a lot of things to make it work we took that by taking this piece of paper and

8:17 tearing up the old architecture of these old centralized controller-based architectures that could just let you do

8:25 Wi-Fi and that's it and if you want management you had to go build some other parallel architecture and if you

8:31 wanted another thing of doing location services to do something neat and special you had to buy yet a third thing

8:37 all of that has gone away because of our movement not only just embracing AI but

8:44 things that make AI be good is about having this microservices cloud and

8:49 things like this so that's and I I can talk a little bit more about that if you like but it is about changing that

8:55 architecture this this stayed stoic you know very hierarchical if it goes down

9:02 your campus is down architecture and changing it helping universities move to

9:08 this cloud-based architecture which has a tremendous number of benefits to being able to now Implement AI within a campus

Challenges and pain points in the education sector

9:16 well that's amazing Mike I can relate to that right so many times my internet is

9:22 done our Network's done not knowing what really happened it was frustrating in the middle of meeting or in the middle

9:28 of speech right uh I also heard about the UTSA and then the Fairfax Starry at

9:35 the summit already so thank you for reiterate that and speaking of that I really like the the fact that you focus

9:42 on unuser experience because that's refreshing but then what are some of the

9:48 challenges and pain point that Network operators in the education sector are sharing today and On a related note I'd

9:56 love to hear more about how Juniper is stepping in to streamline and modernize their operation these operations for

10:03 them sure yeah so so when you look at how we look at life now uh again moving away

10:09 from all this hardware and having to have highly certified people with CCI blank blank blank blank blank and these

10:17 expensive resources which tend to churn a lot in in higher education

10:22 that you you try to say in this new architecture what can we do that's going

10:28 to be different that's more simplified so think about this I mentioned before this architecture that that we have

10:34 where the old architecture that was built in you know the days of the Blackberry that's what was that's what

10:40 still was being purported by a lot of our uh unfortunately by a lot of our competitors that there there it sells a

10:46 lot of equipment it it makes a lot of people have to get expensive certifications and in fact one of the

10:52 certifications you need is that they'll break one little thing inside your network it's one little thing and to get

10:58 certified you got to go find the needle in a haystack my feeling is why would you have a network that could have a

11:04 needle in the haystack that breaks you down in the first place and so by taking again the experience approach we did

11:11 change this and so to to do what we needed to do we created this

11:16 microservices cloud and again we talk I'll talk a little bit about how uh the UT systems have done things as well well

11:23 and a couple of other examples but think about this and if you had this big cloud

11:28 that's the first step toward real Auto AI to me and again we're not talking

11:34 about a cloud like I want to put a controller in the cloud but some people do that this is about micro services

11:40 this Cloud should be able to provide a framework and an infrastructure back to

11:46 people to that are at individual uh campuses to be able to say hey I have

11:52 access to everything I need regardless of where I am on the camera and that if something went wrong but you

11:59 know the worst case scenario last year we had several campuses that were completely shut down by one of our

12:05 competitors because they upgraded their controller architecture it shut them down and when it shut them down it shut

12:11 down all access to the internet from the Wi-Fi so any Services were gone too as

12:16 opposed to from a resiliency standpoint having this wonderful microservices Cloud where every single person is an

12:23 independent entity into the cloud so number one there's nothing that is going to go wrong it's infinitely scalable

12:28 because the cloud can accommodate as small and as large as you want

12:34 and so so what goes up into this microservices Cloud why is that the basis of what we're talking about it's

12:40 this that when an individual and I want to focus on you as an individual as your

12:45 personal experience if I'm sending information up to that cloud on a regular basis about your experience

12:51 while you're on the network that is a game changer because all that is already up there if data is being

12:58 crunched in machine learning to say hey this is what happened or something bad was going on machine learning is

13:04 learning and getting smarter and smarter every day but by the fact that I could take and I'll throw a number out here I

13:10 don't like to get too detailed but think about it every device you have on the network your cell phone here right this

13:18 cell phone being able to send a it's sending 150 pre and post data points

13:25 every minute of every day of just my personal experience on the network up

13:30 into the network to say here's what it is oh I had a problem because I couldn't authenticate because oh it was I was I

13:36 couldn't get on I know about that before you do I know about it because it's being picked up so all of this

13:42 information is Flowing up about problems that have been created things that might be happening that isn't being crunched

13:49 with machine learning so keep in mind this cloud is is gives you the

13:56 experience of every single device on campus but let me take it another step further

14:01 if you had In This Cloud not only the experiences of UT Arlington the UT San

14:07 Antonio or uh Dartmouth College or Oxford or Redding and Bristol and our other huge

14:15 customers like Walmart Fortune one like UPS like CVS

14:22 all of their experiences are also going into the cloud to be able to do this so that's step number two you have to have

14:28 a cloud that can accommodate a wide range of customers everybody should be

14:34 in the same Cloud all their experiences are going there because again what's the number one thing that machine learning

14:39 needs data petabytes of data and so we've been crunching this petabytes of

14:45 data which leads me to third point about good AI is that we've been crunching

14:50 this petabytes of data for over eight years so so when somebody says I'll have ai next month

14:57 but they've never they don't have a microservices cloud they don't have shared customer experiences what are

15:03 they doing they're writing they're writing AI algorithms to try to fix a problem as opposed to saying I've got

15:09 everything I need in the cloud at any given time it's all there and then the

15:14 last thing is to pop a conversational interface on the front of it and we have one called Marvis where you you grind

15:21 this down to a very simple thing Helen you say who's having a bad day on my network and it gives you a tabletop

15:28 version and a responses like here are the people that are having issues right now on your network and here are the

15:34 problems and here's how you can fix it in some cases automated one where you push a button and it's fixed so that

15:41 increases the that um that ability to increase satisfaction

15:47 lower cost just because of the fact that you just don't have trouble tickets in fact Let me throw you a number out

15:53 Dartmouth College is on record of saying that they've dropped their trouble tickets by over 95 and that's all

15:58 because of the fact that they they've embraced AI they embraced This Cloud they embraced a switching to perspective

16:04 and everything and Dartmouth was able to utilize This Cloud architecture to

16:10 reduce it to the point where they actually use students to help do their front-end help desk now that was always

16:16 unheard of right they just sit and run the AI engine and say hey who's having a

16:22 bad day and it gets fixed and so not only do you have a huge reduction in trouble tickets but you also have an

16:28 increase in satisfaction and the load of the churn that goes on in these I.T

16:34 organizations meaning expensive expensive people they can spend the expense of people doing the proactive

16:39 things the one last thing I will say about this and I want to use Dartmouth College again

16:46 when you have this cloud and the way of doing things it changes the nature of how you even Implement and go to market

16:52 as far as getting up and running so Helen I'll give you an example let's just say that you're you're at Dartmouth

16:59 College right now they have like uh 7 000 students there's probably you know

17:04 uh you know thousands of people going to the dorms and whatever how long do you

17:10 think it would take to install 2 000 access points

17:15 and and in just a normal world right no more I would take months months and

What if we told you that

17:21 longer even right because there's just so much what if I told you that because of the

17:26 way this cloud is working they were able to do 2 000 access points in 48 hours

17:33 wow all they did was what they they used students who did 1400 of them the very

17:40 first day they took their access point unclicked the other guy

17:45 yeah click DARS in took a picture of the QR code plugged in the ethernet cable and

17:52 within a minute it was up and running every single one flawlessly they could

17:57 have done all 2024 hours but the students actually wanted to have just a little bit of another free day of lunch

18:04 so we gave him an extra day to finish off the last 400. but that gives you an example of of what happens here just not

18:12 only in the Wi-Fi side but on the switching side so it's a dramatic difference in implementation it's a

18:18 dramatic difference and what we end up doing when it comes to diagnosing trouble and AI plays that big part of it

18:24 but it's also hand in glove with having the right architecture behind everything too well that's remarkable Mike that's

My4 Service Cloud

18:31 truly a game changer right just make sure I got it the my4 service Cloud

18:36 right you have a shared customer experience then you have eight years of a data right to enrich that experience

18:43 on top of that you have a conversational interface that allows people to

18:49 communicate with each other that's amazing I wish I could go back to college again and relive that experience

18:57 um tell us a little bit more obviously could you explain why it's so crucial for you to prioritize user experience in

19:04 higher ad and how is AI coming into play achieving those enhanced and user

19:10 experience and user experience sure so you know user experience it comes in a

User Experience

19:15 different a couple different Stripes if you will you know there's the I'm on your network stripe of being able to

19:22 talk about oh I don't like the fact that I don't have Wi-Fi access in the common room or I don't have access here or

19:29 where I'm going from building it so that's just Network experience on there but there's a a whole other set of

19:35 things of being able to develop applications that can be used to address things and these are things that we do

19:42 because we actually take all this wonderful data that's up there and we provide the ability on most of our

19:49 access points to have what are called location capable events and these location events are provided by the fact

19:57 that in our access points there is a Bluetooth array and the reason I make this and I say the word array because a

20:04 lot of people say well I got Bluetooth all right when I say array there's there's 16 antennas that go in here and

20:11 what it gives me Helen is the ability to tell where if they decide to do this on

20:18 campus that there's always privacy and what is opt into but to be able to know where any device is on the network which

20:24 is your user your phone and know it within one to three meters even if it's on a multi-level thing

20:31 right so we've got universities like uh the one in Texas University Texas uh

20:38 Arlington is one of the first to do it by the way but they were using it for um being able to do blue dot navigation for

20:44 new students and and trying to develop a a something that leverages our free API

Blue Dot Navigation

20:50 we give it to anybody so they can create something to create Blue Dot navigation so when a student comes on campus for

20:57 the first time and they're uncomfortable about where they can go they're able to

21:02 use this to say oh I can find this I'm looking to go to the lunchroom where where is the cafeteria or perhaps think

21:09 about these uh it's harder than possible to be able to say hey uh where's my instructor I really need to find him and

21:15 talk to him where is he and to be able to do that and navigate just as you would not using GPS because GPS is very

21:23 generic and top top level versus a Bluetooth that allows you to get one to

21:28 three meters go through but you also also have a lot of other applications that go to student safety uh we had one

Contact Tracing

21:37 great University on the East Coast who their CIO will tell you that it was like

21:43 a dream come true to watch Juniper roll out it was during the covet era what was the main thing we did in covid

21:50 we shut down campuses we were constantly worried about who was around we had to

21:55 hire a million contact tracers right and these people would ask you okay uh

22:01 you've had covered who are you around you don't remember who you were around for I don't uh over six or eight months

22:07 or nine months or three months or in the case of covet it was just 30 days you don't have any idea of where you may

22:12 have been well one of the things that we're able to do for them was because of the Bluetooth contact tracing and they

22:19 were one of the very first universities to implement using Bluetooth as a way to

22:24 try to mitigate covet they were able to use from a from that standpoint to say

22:29 you know what I know where Mike Newcomb was on this campus over the last 30 days

22:35 I can see he spent most of his time right here in classroom blah blah blah

22:41 and or in this lab and so we don't have to close the whole school we can say you know he spent most of his time here

22:47 let's clean that first let's make that super clean but the best part is is that on campus to be able to say you know I

22:54 was with Helen I was I I was near her for at least five minutes within one to

22:59 three meters we were we were close in proximity I should let Helen know that if she has symptoms that could be

23:05 covered related and get checked right so there was a whole gamut of things that

23:10 were that were then funded through the cares act and things I guess to be able to take advantage using what we had as a

23:15 way to do those kind of things so these are all kind of things that are uh the art of the possible we have people that

Student Retention

23:22 are again this is not necessarily AI related it's more about the extra things that we deliver but for example we have

23:29 um situations where we have a Alliance partner who their purpose in life is

23:34 student retention student retention is about the happiness of the student right number one student

23:40 retention is keeping them in if they go in as a freshman what do you want them to do if you're a university you want them to graduate right you want them to

23:48 go all the way through maybe go through that but usually in the first six months of a new student you'll see that there's

23:54 a fairly Hefty dropout rate because some people don't accommodate or don't acclimate to the university settings and

24:01 so one of the things they are able to do at this company they'll say hey I know where your students are

24:07 based on their patterns some students are not going out of their room they're

24:13 going maybe to lunch and then back to the room but they don't even go to classes maybe and so you can create a risk score so

24:20 that the university can say hey let me have a conversation let me help you are you struggling are you not getting on

24:26 with student life is there something wrong with where you have the dorm set up and so so there's just things like

Campus Security

24:33 that that can be addressed which then leads in their particular case they say they can increase student retention

24:40 uh the the other other topic I will say that comes to again about experience when I send students and when I send my

24:47 kids to college one thing as a parent that's on your mind is are they safe

24:52 right you want your students to be safe there's a lot of crazy things and so to be able to have the ability to

25:01 know that my students are but like if I'm gonna if you know co-ed for example says I'm gonna go do my laundry at nine

25:08 o'clock at night they want to call campus security hey I'm going to do this campus security can watch them

25:13 physically go across the campus go into the laundry room and do what they're doing as far as you know their location

25:19 and say would you please keep it keep track of me in case something that might be sketchy in the middle of the night or

25:25 if they call and say you know I'm I'm uh I don't feel safe there's somebody here that's making me feel unsafe

25:33 so campus security is going to get dispatched what's the first thing that the person is going to do that is feeling unsafe they're hopefully going

25:39 to go take cover or go find someplace and so when a campus security person comes to help check it out you can watch

25:45 them go out of the building and come go to where they need to be and to be able to go look and say okay they're thinking

25:52 about where did my person go well they're over here they're in this room they've got so that seems to be a use case can be

Use Cases

25:59 applied to many other situations right like for example before I visit New York

26:05 or San Francisco I can give them a caulking monitor making sure I'm safe

26:11 wow yeah I mean it's it's very expansive and it all has to do with the fact that you have to have the data in the cloud

26:17 so it you know otherwise it's not it's not really relevant data you get you can

26:23 have data but that part of the Juniper's location services or is there yes yeah so all of the things we do now the

26:30 applications that are built around us are not Juniper created they're done by our partners that want to do it and

26:35 universities create their own applications all the time we give it to them for free it's an application programmer interface that we say here it

26:41 is all the data's there you want to build something for yourself uh like UT Arlington is building on their own

26:48 because they they have their own programmers that they want and they use students to be able to do it they do all

26:54 those things well but you know again the the things that you can offer when you have

Libraries

27:00 this kind of controller things like libraries where if you think libraries are are entities in a college at campus

27:07 believe it or not have to get funded every year and based on use so to be able to know here's who comes to the

27:12 library here's where they dwell here's the people that went to the anthropology section you know here's the most used

27:19 areas you have things like this or uh resources on campus oh where's my uh you

27:26 know you know where's my uh laptop for this particular thing you know you can you can secure those things

27:32 or again like I mentioned before as an instructor I would just like to know who came into my classroom how long they

27:38 dwelled I you know what I hated the worst was wasting 15 minutes of the first part of my class taking roll call

27:44 and then having to think about if somebody left early yeah but for me to be able to say this person has come in

27:50 they dwelled how long they dwell and you know what to be able to feed that on the back end to go up into uh the cloud to

27:57 be able to say now it's in Blackboard or canvas that saves that makes me as an instructor much happier to know that

28:04 there's things like that that can be developed but this is all about having an infrastructure and architecture that

28:11 can accommodate all this every the old architectures do not accommodate this stuff they're all tag-ons and bolt-ons

28:17 that when one thing go if you upgrade one thing it breaks two other things this is a unified way of looking at the

28:23 network well that's an important talk a lot about compost in college what about

Primary Schools

28:29 K-12 primary schools how do they fit into that equation what different needs

28:34 do they bring to the table you know believe it or not they're very similar um when you when you look at this in but

28:41 the biggest point about K-12 is if you really think about it the people that

28:46 have to support the network there's even less resources I I've been

28:52 to high schools where the guy that ran the network was the math teacher science teacher they don't have the ability or

29:00 you know and now bigger districts certainly they might have somebody that does things the way they want it but

29:06 ultimately to be able to use AI operations and to take that load off of

29:11 them so that they know that their K-12 experience of a student you know kindergartner all the way up to high

29:17 school that it's good is going to be dependent on the fact that you've got to have the right people running the

29:23 network well if you can take that load off of them and make AI operations and let the

29:29 majority of that hard work be done by the people that are in the cloud with

29:35 our AI operations things it's going to make a big difference it's going to make it easier let the let the people in K-12

29:42 focus on getting our kids uh doing uh better at Reading Writing and arithmetic

29:47 versus some other things keeping in mind also that on the network the network in

29:52 the kq-12 is much more is becoming more and more needed that the quality of that

29:58 Network because what do you again what are you seeing everybody's got a Chromebook the number of devices that

30:03 are coming in to be able to identify it uh I had one use case not AI specific

30:09 but it was about the security thing I talked about that when a visitor comes on campus they want to know where that

30:15 person's going and know where that do they only go to the places they were supposed to go are they on campus

30:22 you know going around where they wouldn't want to go they wanted to see things like I want to be able to know that if this person went through this

30:28 one door that the door would lock behind it and the front door would lock so they're trapped between the two doors

30:34 because they want they wanna they want to make sure that whatever this person's doing if they're not supposed to be

30:40 where they are they can they can look at it and so that's an integration with Stanley door lock systems for example

30:45 that somebody has developed to say if I go between these two doors it's going to create what's called a Deadman dorsity now that's super important right his

Safety

30:54 safety is number one priority for all not only the parents but Educators as

30:59 well yeah yes to know if you wish you know you know

31:04 every every student you know would have their land you've seen them they all have lanyards and you just happens to be

31:10 let's make this lanyard be a Bluetooth capable thing on their badge you know that because they're they're the student

31:16 there and if something was to happen where the doors are closed and locked

31:22 you can from the networks if you at least see where all your lanyards are in that works oh here's where this has this

31:28 many rooms in there you know who the students are so if somebody's asking is this is my son or daughter there you

31:36 would know that where they are you can use it to locate where they are at any given time because you know obviously

31:42 students even during a non-critical situations you want to know that your your child uh went to class and they're

31:49 they're potentially doing something so again our I call this the art of the possible uh some people have lesser just

31:55 because of privacy and security which is totally fine every every school needs to make its own decision on how they handle

32:02 that and where they draw the line for security versus privacy and they do it together in a cohesive fashion yeah

Education Summit

32:09 absolutely so Mike for those who are interested where can they find the

32:15 on-demand content for Education Summit yes so so you can uh you can get this

32:22 it's on our main web page over if you go to the juniper.net site you'll see in

32:27 the higher education part there's a there's a link for that what Innovation are you most excited about

What are you most excited about

32:34 you know it this is a fun question to answer I've had this asked a couple times

32:39 number one so so we we made this start this journey with Wi-Fi and then Wireless right that's where we were

32:45 wired and Wireless and that's where the journey has started but now once you

32:51 grasp the function of a microservices cloud-based architecture it changes a

32:57 lot of things especially in the security world too so imagine something as simple

33:03 as what like what I call network access control where can I get on the network

33:09 the way that IRS and K-12 have always architected they've had to have these

33:15 esoteric things that take millions of devices on thousands of devices maybe

33:21 not Millions but thousands of vices where I got to go in and individually program this one say okay this guy can go here and this guy can go here here's

33:28 where I can get in from an axis but consider this now that that whole

33:33 access piece is up in the cloud no more equipment down here you're authenticated as you go through the

33:39 cloud and it's simplified enough that Marvis our AI engine is able to interact

33:45 with it to have the machine learning things that are going to interact with it those are the things that are coming but again the first step here was it's

33:52 the architectural change of moving away from tons of equipment that have a lot

33:57 of complexity but something that's in the cloud that gives you that control very quickly and very easily in a

34:04 tabletop manner to be able to take care of thousands of people that are coming on campus and do it very quickly

34:11 so I'm seeing that come there's going to you'll see other things that are coming from just how we deal with routing which

34:18 is very complex as well as well as even our physical or the the firewall type

34:23 security Things We Believe security is throughout everything right but this network access control piece is a huge

34:31 huge differentiator versus the competitor and just like we've we've seen our higher education customers go

34:37 like this we're going to see them also adopting this new way of doing network access control because once they taste

34:44 how smooth and easy and quick it is and how protected and zero trust it is they

34:50 will adopt it I will I I agree all we ask is this Helen try it out if you'll

34:57 just take a proof of concept of what we do and we have programs for higher education to allow us to let you try

35:05 everything I just talked about with all the subscriptions because you know again cost is always something we'll give

35:10 we'll give you everything for a year to try out what we're talking about

35:16 what people that have done that will almost always decide this is the way to

35:21 go because seeing is believing and I'll leave this for you as my last comment once you've seen this you can't unsee it

35:29 you just can't it's that exciting I'm a firm believer in that too my seeing it

35:34 is believing so thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us on AI

35:40 networks and how it has transformed higher ad experiences today Mike here

35:45 are my key takeaways from our conversations number one strong networks

35:51 in the digital age is education's Backbone in today's fast-paced digital

35:57 transformation secure simple and updated educational spaces are more crucial than

36:04 ever Innovations like Ai iot and Smart Technologies are elevating

36:10 collaborations Compass safety and privacy but remember all these

36:15 advancements will rely on robust networks to truly flourish number two

36:20 empowering education through AI networks we're talking about my core services to

36:27 enriched uh shared customer experience and then students experience we're

36:32 talking about seamlessly connecting students with Educators whether they're

36:38 on campus or learning from afar or they want to reach from point A to point B AI

36:45 can in really ensure ensures that dependable Wi-Fi and top-notch network performance fostering that Dynamic

36:53 lectures interactive discussions and teamwork number three is efficiency

36:59 empowered by AI networks uh think of AI driven Network as a proactive problem

37:06 solvers right they detect and fix issues before anyone even notices this not only

37:13 serves valuable time saves valuable time and resources but also fuse hybrid

37:18 learning model the efficient approach reduces cost while making education

37:24 adaptable to various formats and I what I learned from you so let's apply the

37:30 Juniper Networks for their Innovative strides in Secure simple AI driven

37:36 networks addressing the challenges of the cloud era in higher education

37:42 thank you everyone for joining us today stay hungry stay bold and stay grateful

37:49 foreign