Pipeline Profile: John Treece

SCTE Member Since 2002 Title : Director, Cable Business Development,Juniper Networks Broadband Background: Prior to his current role at Juniper, Treece was senior director of access network technologies for Comcast’s advanced engineering group. He also has served as vice-chair for the NGNA headend subcommittee that worked on the M-CMTS architecture, which became part of the NGNA plan. Your NCTA technical paper focused on the ‘edge.’ How does the M-CMTS better enable converged services? There are several layers to convergence, whether it’s service, network or terminal. To accomplish true service convergence, you must first achieve parity at all layers, allowing integration and interoperability between voice, video and data. At the network layer, convergence will require a common and cost-efficient end-to-end transport mechanism, which today, in the metro and core networks, can be IpoE, using MPLS as an example. Although DOCSIS has provided huge benefits for voice and data services, the access network is still somewhat segmented, especially when it comes to video transport. Considering that data and voice services still represent only a small percentage of the overall traffic traversing the network, integrating video services using DOCSIS or even another IP transport mechanism is not scalable, nor is it cost efficient with the current architecture. By leveraging common network components and decoupling previously integrated platforms, the M-CMTS specification provides an architecture that has the flexibility and extensibility to support a multitude of services while reducing capital costs at the same time. I don’t believe customers care if they are seeing an IP stream of CNN or an MPEG stream, so MSOs aren’t going to do IPTV just for the sake of doing IPTV. What makes IPTV intriguing is having common transport methods so that you now can provide cross-functional capabilities such as interactive features via the TV set, or have the ability to stream a VOD asset to your PC. The M-CMTS architecture really acts as an enabler for this type of integration while providing it in a scalable manner. What led you to join Juniper? There are actually a lot of similarities between Juniper and Comcast, but I would say the obvious one is the people. Comcast, like Juniper, was built on extraordinary vision and by the hard work and dedication of its people. In the same way, Juniper’s vision, the ability to execute on that vision, and the opportunities that presented, is what sealed the deal. In February, Juniper celebrated its 10th anniversary as a company, and at the meeting, Scott Kriens presented this statistic: Juniper was one of around 1,600 companies formed in 1996. Today, 10 years later, we are the only company out of that original group that generates revenues over $2 billion. That’s a significant growth rate, and it’s truly exciting to work in that type of dynamic and have an opportunity to extend the architectural work that I did while at Comcast and help bring it to fruition through our M-CMTS product initiative with Motorola. How serious are the security threats to VoIP? As with any new technology, there are going to be concerns around customer security. MSOs have the advantage of history and building on the lessons learned through the DOCSIS evolution, so there is a good foundation that exists today. However, having a solid risk mitigation strategy is key to continued success. Whether attacks originating on the internal network, or outside intrusion attempts, the networks have to have the tools in place to detect, isolate, and mitigate before a threat has the opportunity to propagate beyond the attempted entry point. What does Juniper bring to the table in that area? Juniper has a complete line of security products that have VoIP security capabilities, one of which is the Dynamic Threat Mitigation solution we announced at NCTA. What’s interesting about the Dynamic Threat Mitigation solution is that it adds an additional level of intelligence. Traditional security platforms will recognize a threat and, in a VoIP network for example, will typically drop the call-which is good. But our solution takes that one step further, not just recognizing the threat, but also allowing the operator to take proactive steps to protect and cleanse the affected customer. It really provides a value-add not just to the operator, but also to the end-user. We also a have our VF-series session border controllers (SBCs), which protect the network border and defend against various threats such as DoS attacks, service theft, fraud and many others. And of course, our Firewall/VPN products and Intrusion Detection and Prevention (which we call IDP) products protect against DoS and application layer attacks respectively and each has unique features for VoIP networks. Where do you see MSOs going with IP/MPLS-based technologies? MSOs are in a unique position to leverage IP/MPLS technology to provide reliable and seamless delivery of voice, video and data to their customers over a converged network. Business customers are placing more demand on their providers to offer transparent Layer-2 services. Recent developments in MPLS technology make this possible without having to support, monitor and maintain multiple legacy infrastructures.