US telco AT&T identified the white box as the future of network design last year and has since committed to installing over 60,000 of them in its 5G mobile network towers and small cells over the next few years.

David Hughes is chief executive officer at Silver Peak, the broadband and hybrid wide area network (WAN) company that has done much to foster wider adoption of software defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology in enterprise branch offices over the past couple of years.

It is obvious from the noises being made by its senior executives that Juniper wants to be known as a disruptor - a shining example of a forward looking company ready and willing to embrace the realities of an SDN/NFV market that values virtualised software more than networking hardware.