The new network is founded on the notion that growth in capacity and performance won’t come from simply adding box upon box, but from smart, flexible, customizable software. So who is developing this software?

Fill your halls with all the geniuses, savants and visionaries you can find: the pool of talent outside your walls will always be vastly greater. And that’s a powerful thing. We don’t merely compete with each other. We learn from each other. We work with each other. We push each other forward. That’s the promise implicit in any effective community.

And it’s the promise explicitly delivered to the new network by Junos®, the open and secure operating system at the heart of Juniper routers, switches and security devices.

As you know all too well, the legacy approach to network management is unified in name only. In the past, pervasive interoperability issues hobbled network software development. It was simply too expensive for most businesses to custom-build solutions to any but the biggest issues. Testing costs were huge and reliability was hard to come by. The promised benefits of large, one-vendor environments never materialized. In practice, any robust network ends up running dozens, if not hundreds, of different versions of the legacy OS. Making these versions work together is a feat that currently occupies the bulk of your IT professionals’ time, leaving them little time for development and innovation around your business. Meanwhile, the multi-version legacy environment remains stubbornly hostile to third-party solutions, closing you off to that source of innovation.

Junos has changed the game. It’s an operating system designed to completely rethink the way the network works.

Junos is built around a single base code, and it follows a predictable release track. For enterprises, this means stability and interoperability throughout the network portfolio. Management is vastly simplified and costs are reduced. Upgrades are no longer a daunting nightmare. And IT professionals are out of the baby-sitting business and back in the innovation business.

For third-party developers, Junos creates a new market. Now they have a stable, standard, network platform to innovate around. Junos is open but not open-source—that is to say, it’s not a free-for-all—but rather it’s built with a robust SDK and a controlled licensing process that maintains security while enabling third-party innovation. Almost overnight, a community of nimble, innovative developers has sprung up to take advantage of the new territory for software development. Big players, like NTT Communications, Lockheed Martin and Harris Stratex, are working directly with Junos to create sophisticated software that expands the potential of the network. And literally dozens of other, smaller players are creating network apps that automate and activate the network in remarkable ways. In the future, these numbers will quickly grow into the thousands. Anybody with expertise and an idea now has a platform to work on.

The concept that teamwork is a brain-multiplier is not a new idea. That it can happen across the network environment is.

The new network is here. And it’s running Junos.