Juniper Networks – The Journey to Digital World Class Global Business Services – Transcript

Ken Miller:

We started our GBS team – Juniper did – back in 2005. We started small. In the beginning it really was a cost arbitrage, and it really was focused on transactional services. They’ve clearly evolved since then. They own now the transactional services end to end, but they’ve also moved up the stack to more front-office, more business partnering jobs where they are supporting sales. They are supporting customer services. We don’t look at them as a low-cost, “Please get my work finished,” here’s a project – own it, deliver it right to the business partner. So it’s evolved over time and that trust – as they continue to deliver it – kind of snowballs. Then they get more and more opportunity to do more and more value-added work.

Announcer:

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast.” Week after week, you’ll hear from top experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance.

Martijn Geerling:

Hello and welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast.” I’m your host, Martijn Geerling, managing director and practice leader for Advisory Europe. Today, together with my colleague, Siobhan Rickett, we’re talking with Juniper Networks’ Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Ken Miller. Siobhan, first of all, hi. Great to have you on this call with me.

Siobhan Riggott:

Hi. Great to be here, Martijn.

Martijn Geerling:

And Ken, we’re delighted to have you on this podcast … it’s so great to have you join us and talk to the secret of success in Juniper Networks’ GBS and particularly your role in finance. So thanks for joining us today.

Ken Miller:

Thank you. I really appreciate you inviting me.

Martijn Geerling:

Thank you very much. And so Juniper Networks is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, as one of the most exciting technology companies in Silicon Valley today. With over 10,000 employees in 50 countries and over $5 billion annual revenue, they’re a global leader in AI networking, cloud and connected security solutions. Their customers include the top 100 global service providers in 30,000 enterprises, including the global Fortune 100.

So Ken, before we get started, you’ve been with the company for quite some time and now in the role of executive vice president, CFO at Juniper Networks. Can you just say a few words about your organization, the finance function, and then we’ll dive deeper into your role – the finance function. And also to celebrate with you the success of the GBS organization, we’ve given you a Digital World Class award for GBS for the fifth year running. So we’d like to talk about the performance of your organization, and how you and your team have helped shape that. But starting off with your role, can you say a few more words about your role in the finance function?

Ken Miller:

Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I’ve been at Juniper for quite some time. I’ve been here over 24 years. I’ve had various roles in that tenure at Juniper, and since 2016 I’ve been the CFO – I’ve had the honor to be the CFO here at Juniper Networks. And really the finance organization at Juniper is over 500 employees. Overall, Juniper is close to 11,000 employees and the finance team’s about 500 of those 11,000. We have locations in Bangalore, India, and Sunnyvale, which is our corporate headquarters as you mentioned, as well as Westford, Massachusetts. Those would be our three primary sites.

We also have about 15%, 16% of the organization that’s really remote workers. So we have employees kind of scattered around the globe supporting the business. We do the traditional accounting, tax, treasury, internal audit functions, and obviously we also do the finance functions, corporate FP&A, business partnering supporting go-to-market finance, supporting the business units. So really it’s a comprehensive CFO organization supporting Juniper Networks.

Martijn Geerling:

OK, thank you for that background. And so finance as a function needs to support company strategy – whether it be digital transformation. And you as a company are at the center of that mergers and acquisitions and growth being a strategic partner, turning data into insight. Can you talk about all these sort of challenges as a finance function, and how you’ve evolved finance in the past years as you took your role, and how you have taken that role of finance to the next level?

Ken Miller:

Yeah. So finance, I believe, has evolved a lot over the last couple decades. It’s no longer just a back-office function of closing the books and making sure we get the compliance right. I mean that’s obviously table stakes and something we take a lot of pride in, making sure we have the fiduciary responsibilities that we own – that we take care of those – and we are compliant in everything that we do and have high integrity. But it’s evolved to more of the business ownership function – more of a partnership – not even just supporting the business, but partnering with the business and owning business transformation.

So you mentioned a few things. Mergers and acquisitions, let’s just look at that as an example. We engage from the very beginning of should we acquire the target and why from an ROI perspective clearly throughout the negotiation phase of a potential transaction like that. The integration phase is very important, and finance has a heavy role in integrating an acquired company. And we don’t stop there. Maybe 10, 20 years ago you might’ve stopped at integration, but we take it all the way through to results. Are we getting the outcomes that we anticipated and the reason why we acquired the company in the first place? Are we actually getting those business results? And finance plays a key role in making sure that that happens throughout the life cycle of the M&A.

Martijn Geerling:

Yeah, and if you look at from the outside … and when we look at what is a top priority for finance organizations, we study this, for example, in our Key Issues Study. One of the key areas and concerns for GBS and finance organizations is to look at investing and accelerating the digital transformation journey. So if you think about digitization for finance, how does that play out in your function? What have you done in the past few years in that space?

Ken Miller:

Yeah, so I think digitization across all enterprises has just been a thing for quite some time. And quite honestly, Juniper Networks as an enterprise takes advantage of that. That’s who we sell to. We sell to enterprises that are digitizing their network – digitizing their operations – which requires them to improve their networks and their security within their network, which is really what we deliver for them. But as an entity ourselves, we are very focused on improving processes, improving systems, automating where we can.

The mantra that you hear me talk about a lot is effectiveness and efficiencies. We have to make sure we do an excellent job, which is the effectiveness angle, but we need to do it as efficiently as possible. And there really are more and more tools – more and more opportunities – to continue to automate and continue to work on efficiency. And Juniper finance – Juniper as a company and GBS in particular – really leads the way in that effort. Whether it’s RPA or just other automation tools, we’re seeing a lot of opportunity to continue to digitize the enterprise and really for the better, how we engage with customers, how we engage with vendors, how we engage with partners. Everything is digital these days.

Martijn Geerling:

Right. And I know that digitization, we talk a lot about the technology and the challenges and the opportunities that that brings, but there’s also the flip side of getting capacity, talent, availability, getting the investments for this kind of investment. And I think talent and people is a passion of yours. So if you talk about the flip side of … on the one end we drive digitization as a function, what are you doing on the other side to get that kind of investment for the function secured to change finance with technology? And how do you address the challenge of talent and development, and what’s sometimes viewed as the robots are taking over our jobs?

Ken Miller:

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I mean, I would say that there’s probably more opportunity than there is capacity and budget to do. So there is definitely a prioritization required, right? We can’t do all great ideas, even though they probably are individually great ideas. So there is a prioritization process. We look at business value – almost an ROI type of an analysis. What’s going to provide the biggest bang for our buck? So we can then prioritize the projects that move the needle the furthest. So there is a pretty heavy prioritization effort that we do … pretty heavy annually, and we review that every quarter to make sure we’re still doing the right thing. So prioritizing is definitely an important part of it.

The other thing you mentioned was just the people part of it. And to me, even more than budget, I think the thing to hold some companies back is complacency. It’s employees that quite honestly don’t want to evolve – don’t want to change. They’re comfortable with what they’re doing. Maybe they’ve been doing it for a long time. I really view complacency as one of the enemies of enterprises, and I’m proud to say Juniper does not have that problem. Right? Our GBS team and Juniper overall, we have a lot of employees that are really excited about the opportunity. They don’t look at some of these innovations as threats. They look at them as opportunities. So the willingness to transform is a key hurdle that I think does trip up some companies, but we’ve been able to overcome that with the culture we have, which is really an innovation-led culture.

Martijn Geerling:

Can you just elaborate on that point? Because I do see from the outside as well that innovation and both bottom up and top down in the organization is part of the secret to success.

Ken Miller:

It absolutely is. I mean we’re in the technology space, so innovation’s always been key to our products. It’s been key to what we deliver to customers, out innovating our competition, creating that value prop, which we think we’ve absolutely done successfully over the years and are super excited about that. But it’s more than that. It’s really about the entire organization. All of the functions thinking about how can I do this better? We have a lot of folks at Juniper that’ve been here a long time. I mentioned I’ve been here a long time.

Sometimes with tenure comes a bit of complacency – a bit of here’s how we do things here. And if you don’t stay current – if you’re not willing to learn – you fall behind, and you need to evolve. And I think it’s a mindset. The employees we attract, the employees we develop… although Juniper’s a relatively large company – over 11,000 employees – we still have that kind of ownership mindset. How can I improve? How can I help this company that you might see more in a smaller company – more that kind of startup mentality. And to me, it really is about the people. I mean, you can’t really force it tops down. You can encourage it, but it really is more of a bottoms-up culture that Juniper gets to enjoy.

Martijn Geerling:

Thank you for that. Now, I’ve been asking you sort of the broad stroke, but really Siobhan has been working with you and the GBS organization. So global business services, you’ve achieved, like I said at the beginning, Digital World Class performance, which is really about the outcome that you achieve. And just like you said, “It’s not just about the efficiency side, it’s about the effectiveness and the customer experience.” So for that part, Siobhan, you probably want to go deeper into this area and just share a few of the achievements that Juniper Networks has in this area.

Siobhan Riggott:

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks, Ken. So like we said – Martijn said – we just talked more about the finance organization and the role of the finance. But good to maybe just dive down a little bit more and talk about the GBS organization and its role within your finance function, and how it has evolved over time. Like you said, we’ve recognized you as a Digital World Class GBS organization. And part of that will be about the scale and part will be about the scope. It would be about all of the different aspects you’ve talked about from an innovation perspective and talent.

But if you could just maybe just expand a little bit more and talk a little bit specifically about the GBS organization, and how that has evolved over time and the role it plays in your overall CFO organization that’d be great.

Ken Miller:

No, absolutely. So as I mentioned before, the CFO organization is over 500 employees. The GBS organization is approximately 350 of those just over 500. So it is the majority from a head count perspective of my entire organization. We started our GBS team – Juniper did – back in 2005. Obviously, we started small. In the beginning it really was a cost arbitrage, and it really was focused on transactional services. They’ve clearly evolved since then. They still have … they own now the transactional services versus just maybe helping deliver those services. They actually own them end to end. But they’ve also moved up the stack – if you will – to more front-office, more business partnering jobs where they’re supporting sales. They’re supporting customer services.

From a business partnering and finance FP&A perspective, it truly is part of the team. We don’t look at them as a low-cost, “Please get my work finished while I go to bed, and I wake up the next morning and you move the ball.” But here’s a project – own it, deliver it, and quite honestly, go ahead and deliver it right to the business partner.

So it’s evolved over time and that sets trust. That trust – as they continue to deliver, as they continue to execute – it kind of snowballs. Then they get more and more opportunity to do more and more value-added work. And that’s really, to me, what I believe has enabled them to be a winner, a world-class digital organization for five years running is because they’ve taken GBS into the business partnering level – not just the back-office support level.

Siobhan Riggott:

Brilliant, thank you. I’m just going to say – we have mentioned a couple of times – that we recognize yourselves as a GBS Digital World Class organization. I think you’ve touched already on say the efficiency and effectiveness aspects. But being Digital World Class and the fact we’ve recognized you as that means from our perspective that you are outperforming your peers both in terms of those different dimensions. We talk about operational excellence, which effectively is predominantly is that efficiency component. And then the business value, which is more around realization strategic objectives. Also, the customer experience aspect.

I mean, I think achieving that for one year is quite impressive, but achieving it for five consecutive years is really, really quite impressive. To those that are listening into the session today, I think you’ve touched on some of the different aspects in terms of your ethos, but I would like to maybe just touch on or maybe deep dive a little bit more and hear your view on what that secret to the success has been in terms of the GBS organization. You just mentioned their trust. If you could just expand on that a little bit more in terms of what your top-three five secrets would be.

Ken Miller:

No, absolutely. And I think overall I would say GBS as a function is one of the secret sauces for Juniper finance, right? I mean, it really is kind of our crown jewel of our finance organization. And I think why is our GBS organization so successful? I think it really does start with leadership. Varun, who’s our vice president of Global Business Services, has been there. I think he was the first employee we hired back in 2005, or at least one of the top two or three. And he’s now leading that organization, and he’s done a phenomenal job. He doesn’t settle. I mean, you want to talk … I mentioned complacency as being the enemy of an organization. He is very much on the forefront of what’s possible. He’s very well-connected with what other companies are doing, and he’s not trying to catch up. He’s trying to lead the way.

So there’s a mindset that he brings to the team that I think is absolutely a big piece of our secret as to why we’re so successful there. He also … although he does lead from the top, he doesn’t. He has a leadership style that really keeps all the employees engaged. In fact, he has the highest employee engagement scores in the entire company. We do surveys every year, and his team from an engagement perspective scores the highest in the entire company. And Juniper’s score is quite high. Finance’s score is really high, but our GBS team is the highest of all those. So really it’s not just about dictatorship and making people do what he wants them to do to stay ahead. But it’s actually getting the employees engaged and delivering on their own because there was over 300 of them. He can’t have his pulse on everything. So he fosters a great team.

And as you mentioned, and I mentioned earlier, it’s kind of a prove it, get more, prove it, get more kind of process. Where it did take some time for us to cross some of those transaction services to more finance business partnering services, to more supporting other functions outside of finance, they didn’t just get that from the beginning. They had to earn that as they went along. And you earn that by just delivering excellence.

So it’s about delivering excellence. It’s about staying engaged. It is a two-way transaction. I talk a lot about when we move something to GBS, you can’t just send it over the wall and hope it lands. There’s still some care and feeding required from whatever the function was that used to have that particular task. So you have to work together. There’s a lot of collaboration between GBS and the other functions, but the fact that they’re willing to collaborate – and they do so, so successfully – gives them the opportunity to continue to do more and more.

Siobhan Riggott:         

Brilliant, thank you. That’s really great to hear. So looking forward … so that’s the journey. So far we’ve talked about the journey so far – what we’ve achieved, how that’s evolved, what the secrets are, although obviously we’ve given the secrets away now. But really where do you see, looking forward, where do you see GBS in general and maybe also specifically the Juniper GBS organization evolving?

Ken Miller:

Yeah. Well, we’ve talked a lot about digital transformation and processes, and I think we’re quite honestly just at the tip of the iceberg on some of the opportunities there. We’ve been leveraging RPA. We’ve been leveraging some automation and clearly analytical tools. But generative AI is the next big opportunity. I don’t think it’s going to change the world tomorrow, but I think it will change the world over the next couple of years. And I do believe our GBS team is going to be on the forefront of that. So just making sure we stay plugged in. We stay current to the opportunities that are around us and continue to push the envelope – continue to innovate.

And I expect GBS to continue to do that. And as I mentioned, I would highlight generative AI is probably the next frontier of opportunity there. I think they’ll continue to not just settle for back-office functions only. They’ll innovate there. They’ll do those as efficient and effective as they can, but they also want to do more transformative, more business partnering, and they’ll continue to get more and more of that over time as well.

So I think more of the same – just continuing to accelerate the path that they’re on. As you mentioned, there are already world class. I don’t think we really need to have a step-function change there. We just need to continue evolve as the opportunities do.

Siobhan Riggott:

All right, it’s been fantastic to listen in today and have the opportunity to talk with you and get your perspective. So thank you very much for sharing the insights in terms of your transformation journey and specifically the GBS organization. And thanks for joining us today.

Ken Miller:      

My pleasure. Thank you very much.

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