IBM Services and Juniper Networks signed a $325 million deal that will see IBM help manage the networking giant’s on-premises and cloud infrastructure and workloads.

Working with IBM will allow Juniper to “collaborate with them on innovative solutions for our cloud-first business model,” said Juniper CIO Bob Worrall in a statement.

Juniper, like many large enterprises, has a mix of cloud native and legacy applications and workloads. “The Juniper program will help them design and build the right multi-cloud environment, and mange those workloads on a combination of clouds,” said Bill Lambertson, director of cloud industry solutions at IBM.

Under the seven-year agreement, IBM will use its IBM Services Platform with Watson to help manage Juniper’s support systems including data centers, help desks, and data and voice networks.

To be clear: this is not an IoT platform deal, although Lambertson admits that when many people hear “platform” and “Watson” in the same sentence that is what they think.

“Certainly IoT could be a workload, but this is really using our cognitive capabilities around robotics, scripting, predictive insight, analytics,” he explained. “It’s using these cognitive capabilities under the Watson umbrella to help with the operations of cloud and data center environments.”

IBM will also introduce the “Factory Development” concept to create a more agile IT environment using automation and cognitive tools. This helps drive efficiency and cost savings as enterprises move to cloud native applications, Lambertson said — but it also requires a big culture shift.

“As customers move from legacy application development to microservices there’s a whole set of lessons learned, methodology, and tools that IBM provides to help them migrate those applications and modernize those applications,” he said. We look across the technology, the skills, the tools, and the culture.”