Alcatel-Lucent Cisco

Juniper orchestration initiative to address services platform

Juniper, at its industry analyst event scheduled before its primary analyst meeting, hinted of a major initiative later this year in what the company calls “orchestration.” The new activity, coming out of its emerging network management team, appears to be creating a model for NGN services that is not radically different from the NGNSA model we propose in our TMT Advisor Planners’ Briefing.

Just what Juniper will release was not discussed, but the timing was early second-half of 2009. The lack of an effective architecture for NGN services is in our view the major issue in the industry, and Juniper’s lack of progress toward one is one of our most significant concerns about the company’s strategy.

If Juniper were to move aggressively here we believe that it could steal the march on Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco, or at least force them to step up their respective plans. The way the idea was explained makes it sound far more like a fundamental architecture than like “network management”, though, and we hope Juniper won’t bury the idea in the wrong organization.