Juniper Networks

Cisco and blade server plans

Cisco has not been shy in pushing the envelope of what a networking company does, and one extension that’s been rumored for quite a while has now appeared in public—though still as a rumor. Cisco is said to be working on a blade server product family, something that would extend the company’s reach into the service layer of the network. The move would, in our view, help Cisco with service providers whose focus increasingly is on servers and service delivery platforms (SDPs) and higher-layer features.

 It would also help in the enterprise to support hosted applications that are tightly coupled with the network, including unified communications (UC). One impact of this step would be to formalize Cisco’s entry into the IT space, something that’s been inevitable anyway as Cisco works to rise up the value chain.

 In all, we believe this rumor is absolutely true and a good thing for Cisco. It will put considerable pressure on Cisco’s competitors, especially Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper, to flesh out their own strategies. Alcatel-Lucent has already announced a strategic shift to the “online ecosystem” that links developers and telcos, but Juniper has not articulated a strategy here yet, though the company has spoken at conferences on the topic of open networks.

Cisco’s four-day holiday: Signaling stability?

Cisco plans an unprecedented shutdown for four days during the holiday period, part of a plan to achieve over a billion dollars in cost savings to help counter the impact of the downturn in IT and networking spending.

We believe the step is a kiss blown at Wall Street, something Cisco knows is likely not to be the right answer but that may be necessary to support the stock price in the near term. Even in that light, we believe the move to be unwise because it tars Cisco with the brush of a firm experiencing problems in the downturn, something competitors might play on directly but that will indirectly challenge the most basic value proposition Cisco presents to buyers—stability.

Juniper continues software transformation

Juniper has announced the first major innovation in its Service Layer Technology area, something it calls the Dynamic Services Architecture. This is a new product set, the first of which is the SRX Services Gateway, built on a platform that tightly couples service feature hosting and both signaling and control plane protocol handling. Cards are software-configurable to support multiple services, firewall services being the first announced.

This is the second of Juniper’s announcements that have created a “higher-than-the-network” layer of technology, the first being the company’s support of hosted control plane software for JUNOS. When you add this to the recent management changes at Juniper, it begins to look as though the company may be taking a turn more toward software and “transformation” versus routers and “convergence”.

Juniper exec changes could indicate software emphasis

Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms and Services division that was working for the Yahoo acquisition, is leaving Microsoft to run Juniper Networks. Juniper issued a press release indicating that Johnson will become CEO and Scott Kriens will become the chairman and will still be involved in strategic matters.

We believe this is a good thing. Johnson represents a vision of where Juniper must go, which is beyond being a box vendor or its products will commoditize and its stock stagnate or fall. Kriens understands where Juniper is now, and how near-term modifications can be made to lead to the ultimate direction Johnson represents. Both the goal and the route are equally critical for Juniper, and we hope that the two can be harmonized by Johnson and Kriens cooperation and effective collaboration.

 We have heard that this change has been in the works for some time and was at least in part responsible for the other recent executive changes at Juniper. For Microsoft, which will be reorganizing its Platforms and Services area, the departure of Johnson seems to signal a bitter aftermath of the failed Yahoo deal and an internal conviction that the deal cannot now be done, though some inside Microsoft tell us that’s not necessarily the case.

At Juniper, the move is not completely a surprise. Kriens was one of the few executives to start a tech company and remain CEO through its IPO and operation as a major public corporation. Last year, according to rumors, there was board pressure to make some changes in Juniper and Stephen Elop was brought in (from Adobe). Elop left after a year (ironically, joining Microsoft). It would be significant in our view that Johnson, like the other executives recently joining Juniper have a software background.

We have long said that Juniper and other network equipment vendors needed to be more focused on the software layer of the network to insure they could sustain feature differentiation. The changes at Juniper suggest that there may be a shift to a more software-centric position, and perhaps a more aggressive positioning in the Carrier Ethernet space, but it is clearly too early to say for sure.

Emerging economies create emerging vendors

Emerging economies’ telecom deals may be creating a new wave of key players, absent some of the usual names. The recent action in China and India show that where an emerging economy invests in telecom infrastructure, the deals are weighted toward access, metro and fiber, and less to the high-flying switching/routing. Package bids that involve a range of products are also more common. This favors players like Alcatel-Lucent, whose broad portfolio of access products and metro solutions got it attention in India, but also price-leader players like Huawei and ZTE. We believe it is likely that there will be pressure put on Cisco, Juniper, Tellabs, Ciena and other more narrowly focused players to partner or even merge to counter the trend.

Router sales up…an IP economic indicator

Infonetics reports that router sales in the first quarter rose sharply, further validating the notion that the IP infrastructure market is more immune to economic problems than the enterprise. Both Juniper and Cisco gained market share, apparently in part at the expense of Alcatel-Lucent, whose IPTV position had previously been gaining it traction. We have long believed that IPTV would not be the silver bullet for ALU; too few regions meet the very special economic demographic requirements to make the strategy optimal.

Juniper announces IPsphere implementation

Juniper Networks and Net One Systems have announced the CONTENTsphere Field Trial Cookbook, a collaboration between the two companies to generate an implementation of IPsphere’s content distribution field trial, authorized by the body in the plenary meeting last September. A contribution on the Cookbook is being presented this week at the Stockholm IPSF plenary. The move is important because up to now no vendor has announced an implementation of IPsphere, even Juniper, which was the force behind starting the body about three years ago. This may also signal increased interest in the software space by Juniper, which could be positive for the company’s strategic directions. The question now will be what other vendors in the IPSF do, and what the providers do to encourage other implementations. We expect some insight out of the meetings this week in Stockholm.

Juniper move signals original processor work?

David Yen, a kingpin in Sun’s revitalized microprocessor program, is leaving Sun for Juniper, where he will be an executive VP of Emerging Technologies, a move that certainly means that Juniper will be doing more original work with microprocessors and/or network processors. There has been a lot of new energy at Juniper in recent months, suggesting that the company is about to make some aggressive moves in the market to sustain its growth and take advantage of loss of market momentum by its mobile-exposed competitors.

Juniper “gets” the network/computer vision

Juniper held its analyst day on Thursday (March 6, 2008), and the company was more polished and articulate than on previous occasions. The message that the “online revolution” has created a demand for a new vision of network/computer coupling is strong and was supported strongly by a T-Systems speaker, but not seized as effectively by Juniper as we’d have liked. Juniper also failed to leverage clear references by T-Systems to IPsphere and TMF standards work, and in the former Juniper has credibility. However, the message was there, and it’s clear that Juniper gets it, but the company needs to articulate it more clearly. In the area of the new Ethernet EX products, Juniper articulated a strong channel program that has credibility as the go-to-market strategy for the EX, lifting our fear that it believed its software partners, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, were going to sell it. All in all, it was a positive step for Juniper.

Juniper separates router control plane processing

Juniper today announced a significant shift in the traditional architecture of routers, one that allows an external server (the JCS 1200) to provide control plane processing for forwarding-plane networks created on Juniper’s line of routers. Traditional router architecture has used either an integrated processor for both data forwarding and control processing, or a separate board within the router for the control plane handling. The new architecture allows an enormous increase in the processing resources available to handle “control plane” activity, which includes the processing of management requests, topology updates, and other IP control packets. Since Juniper has previously announced an “Open Junos” architecture where developers can add logic to the Junos control plane software, this would appear to open the door to embed significant service and feature intelligence in network devices. This in turn could empower service providers to differentiate their services through these embedded features, or to sell access to them as a new revenue source.