The big switch

When Juniper Networks finally announced its enterprise switch series, Brid-Aine Conway was in New York to find out if and how that move will shake the market.

It wasn't a huge shock to the IT world when Juniper Networks announced its new family of Ethernet switches at the end of January. The rumours, speculation and conjecture that this was the only way forward for Juniper had been circulating even before the company started pouring millions of dollars into building the switches two years ago.

 

What is interesting is how this move now changes Juniper's market position in regards to both its potential customers and its competitors, particularly the network behemoth, Cisco.

Juniper's supporters will claim that it is slowly eating into Cisco's dominant market shares where they compete - the doomsayers look at the breadth of the existing gap, the longevity of Cisco's dominance and its formidable record for squishing the competition.

Up until now, Juniper has focused mainly on the service provider market where Cisco's presence has not yet been really felt. In areas like enterprise core routers, though Juniper is in second place, the gap between them is often large. Most analysts estimate that Cisco's market share in core routers is around 60%, compared to around 30% for Juniper.

In fact, pundits sometimes refer to Juniper's customers as feeling ABC - Anything But Cisco - pointing out the fact that they often come to Juniper through unhappiness with Cisco or as the only other alternative if a customer doesn't want to go with the market leader.

Juniper is not above acknowledging this itself, although it does so obliquely - but as Scott Kriens, CEO of Juniper, remarks, this announcement puts the company in a whole new position: "Now being able to compete fully, being a comprehensive answer to enterprise network needs, I think that is going to open up new customer dialogue and create new visibility for us in the market compared to the absence of the product up until now.

Mark Bauhaus, Juniper's executive vice president of service layer technologies, elaborates: "Juniper is different; we're a changed company as of today's announcement. With secure high performance switching we have a complete portfolio end-to-end and it's integrated so there's a new conversation that we can have with the market-place.

And I think customers, once they see that, are going to want to take a look at our product offerings side-by-side and make their own comparison, they now have two choices where they used to have only one. For a lot of people, Cisco is the other choice and we're absolutely comfortable competing head-to-head with a complete portfolio."

The question on most analysts' minds is whether or not Juniper is ready to stand up to the giant of enterprise networking. Juniper has built its strength on the provision of high performance networks for service providers, a niche in the networking market. Now, Juniper needs a whole new strategy to connect with enterprise customers.

Bauhaus, however, believes the company has that strategy: "We're coming from a strength in service providers to a strength in enterprise. In fact, enterprise requirements have in a sense come to Juniper in terms of speed, reliability, safety and security. So banking, for example, certainly has these requirements, as well as international commerce, national security, citizen management, citizen tools - all have the same kind of attributes of high performance.

"Juniper has brought in a number of executives new to the company - a new CFO, a new CMO, myself running one of the main divisions, new sales executive talent - all from the enterprise world and that's very much on purpose. It turns out that a lot of the requirements are the same.

That end-to-end security, whether it's with unified access, SSL VPN, firewalls, intrusion protection, UTM, security built into routing and switching, it's all the same stuff that an enterprise needs. So we're explicitly adding features for those markets and we're adding talent to the organisation to scale into those markets," he adds.

Juniper seems confident it has the strategy to back up its move - the next question is whether or not it has the goods.

The EX-series of Ethernet switches launched in New York has a number of factors which may lead to customers taking a new look at its overall portfolio.