Since the announcement of Dell’s purchase of EMC, there’s been speculation that this mega-deal will cause a ripple effect among other companies.

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim alluded to the Dell/EMC deal during Juniper's earnings call yesterday, but he said it’s not just companies coming together and coming apart (as in HP’s case). It’s also a technology transformation.

Rahim said service providers and enterprises are using a new approach to deliver value to their customers, and that approach requires virtualization, automation, visibility, and analytics. “In my mind [that] requires that there would be somebody that’s absolutely focused on innovation in the space of IP networking,” he said. “And I believe that’s the role that we satisfy in this industry.”

While he didn’t give any hints that Juniper was interested in selling itself, he said, “I’m actually open to M&A, and it will be, as I said, very much complementary to our strategy: tuck-in type technology M&As that will be easy to integrate and work to accelerate the strategy that we are already executing on. I do believe that M&A can be a good part of our strategy with the right timing and certainly something that’s complimentary to our overall strategy.”

Elsewhere on the call, Rahim referred to AT&T selecting Juniper’s Contrail Networking as a "landmark deal for us this quarter." Contrail will be orchestrating the creation of virtual networks within AT&T’s cloud infrastructure.

The deal is part of a bigger push by AT&T to advance its Network On Demand initiative, using software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) to speed services to business customers.

“I want to underscore how strategic our Contrail solution is in defining the IT and business evolution to the cloud. Customers are moving towards open source products, software-driven automation and containers and micro services,” Rahim said.

Juniper won four new customers in the quarter, and apparently, Contrail is coming up in a lot of customer talks. Rahim said Contrail is of interest especially on the service provider side, but also to some larger enterprises. “They are thinking about a new architectural approach and Contrail is part of that discussion.”