Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks
Type Public (NYSEJNPR)
Industry Networking hardware
Founded February 6, 1996
Headquarters United StatesSunnyvale, California, USA
Area served Worldwide
Key people Kevin Johnson, CEO
Pradeep Sindhu, CTO,
Scott Kriens, Chairman
Products Routers, switches, Firewalls, Intrusion detection systems, VPN hardware
Revenue increase USD 3.57 billion (2008) (up 26% from 2007)
Net income increase USD 650.8 million (2008)
Employees 7000+ (2009) in 47 countries
Website www.juniper.net

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NYSE:JNPR) is an information technology and computer networking products multinational company, founded in 1996. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, USA. The company designs and sells high-performance Internet Protocol network products and services. Juniper's main products include T-series, M-series, E-series, MX-series, and J-series families of routers, EX-series Ethernet switches and SRX-series security products. JUNOS , Juniper's network operating system runs on most of the Juniper products. In 2009, Juniper made its debut on Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work for.[1] Juniper ranked 4 in Fortune Magazine's World's Most Admired Companies list in Networking Communications category in 2009.[2]

Contents

Corporate history

Juniper Networks was the creation of computer scientist Pradeep Sindhu, once principal scientist of Xerox's renowned Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), who in 1995 left for a vacation and returned with a concept for a new company that would build reliable, high-performance routers to support the quickly emerging Internet. Sindhu started the company in February 1996 with $200,000 in seed money from powerful venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He hired two other engineers, Bjorn Liencres from Sun Microsystems and Dennis Ferguson from MCI. For business expertise, Sindhu recruited Scott Kriens, co-founder of StrataCom, a leading supplier of switching equipment sold in July 1996 to Cisco for US$4.67 billion.

Pradeep Sindhu served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors until September 1996. Scott Kriens became CEO in October 1996, and is often credited with leading Juniper's initial commercial success. Juniper was reincorporated in March 1998 in Delaware.

As a startup, Juniper received $6 Million in funding from AT&T and the Anschutz Corporation in 1997. It also received another $14 million from a variety of venture capitalists. It garnered the financial support of over $40 million of Northern Telecom, 3Com, UUNET Technologies, a subsidiary of WorldCom, the Siemens AG/Newbridge Networks alliance; and Ericsson.[3][4]

Juniper shipped its first product, the M40 router, in September 1998. The product was a first-ever implementation of packet forwarding in silicon (ASICs) that could sustain line-rate packet forwarding across eight packet-over-SONET (OC48c) ports in a half-rack form factor. This was a critical technological improvement, which allowed unconstrained growth of Internet and secured Juniper a place in a market formerly dominated by Cisco Systems.

Juniper went public on June 25, 1999. The price per share was US$34.00, and 4.8 million shares were offered on the Nasdaq National Market under the trading symbol JNPR. The company had one of the most successful initial public offerings in history. By the end of the first day as a publicly traded company, Juniper's stock rose to $98.88, a 190 percent single-day jump that increased the company's market capitalization to just below $4.9 billion, the highest first-day valuation for a technology company, according to Securities Data Corp.

Juniper maintained market momentum by rapidly delivering new products based on successful M40 design. Smaller version with partial redundancy (M20) was launched by the end of 1999 and compact M5/M10 platforms were added in the following year. The M-series success was further cemented in March 28, 2000 with release of M160, which employed packet spraying across quad M40-style packet engines to achieve line rate forwarding at OC192 speeds.

By 2000, Juniper was strongly eating into the growing slice of its main rival Cisco's Internet router pie and took 30% of the core router market.[5][6][7][8]

However, the absolute dominance of M-series on the carrier routing market did not last for long. In attempt to defend it's market share, Cisco responded with Engine 4 linecard for its GSR router in 2001, starting the first round of "core wars". Although Engine 4 was a "time-to-market" product with virtually no features other than simply forwarding IP and MPLS, M160 was also a stretch of the original M40 blueprint. In order to move forward, Juniper needed a new platform.

The status quo was broken in 2002, when Juniper announced their new flagship router, T640. Unlike the original M-series, T-series was a distributed design, capable of 40 Gigabit/slot performance and terabit-level system scaling with multichassis options. Juniper T-series delivered a terminal blow to Cisco's flagship core product GSR, from which the latter had never recovered (Cisco refocused surviving GSR 12000/12400 systems for provider's edge networks).

However, the initial technological advantage of Juniper T-series was not effectively converted into the market share: by mid-2002, the dot-com bubble was deflating at high speed and most carriers cut their growth plans and expense budgets[9]. Looking for alternative revenue sources, in 2002 Juniper announced plans to expand its line of Internet core routers to the edge[10] and started scoping other markets — such as enterprise and security.

As a first result of this strategy, by the end of 2002 Juniper penetrated the broadband aggregation segment with the Juniper E-series BRAS devices based on technology by Unisphere Networks. This move towards the edge was further supported by extending the Juniper M-series technology towards network edge with M40e (2002)and M7i-M10i (2003) systems.

In a next phase of the market expansion, Juniper made a move into enterprise and security space with the technology acquired from NetScreen Technologies as well as the internally developed low-end router family Juniper J-series. In the last quarter prior to acquisition (ending Dec 31st 2003), NetScreen reported $81 million in revenue [11], and Juniper Networks reported net revenue of $207 million [12].

A second round of "core wars" broke out in 2004, with the launch of Cisco Carrier Routing System. Unlike a dated GSR design, Cisco CRS-1 featured innovative hardware and brand new operating system IOS XR aimed squarely at Juniper T-series. However, at 40 Gbps/slot (full-duplex) Cisco Carrier Routing System did not offer better density compared to Juniper T640 and mostly maintained parity in features, which allowed Juniper to continue investing in R&D and market expansion.

Further progress of Juniper in the edge market in 2004 was marked by migration from M-series technology (M40e) towards silicon derived from the flagship T-series. Despite the M-series moniker, Juniper M320 was based on the same chipset as T-series and became a formidable entry into the multiservice edge product category. Another edge milestone was reached in 2006, when Juniper delivered a highly-integrated, edge-specific 10Gbps chipset (I-Chip) which formed the basis for a highly redundant M120 edge router and a new family of Ethernet-specific carrier routers, Juniper MX-series. Driven by the growing importance of Ethernet services, Juniper MX-series gained customer base in excess of 250 accounts in less than 18 months after the initial launch and also lends its hardware to SRX series of security appliances. The latest generation of MX is based on "Trio" chipset with up to 120Gbps (full-duplex) per slot, which was quite an achievement for 2009.

On the core side of the business, in 2007 Juniper also took the leadership in the third round of "core wars" after releasing a 100Gbps/slot Juniper T1600 juggernaut. As of end 2009, Juniper T1600 remains the densest core router commercially available and has been augmented by options such as a multichassis system (TX Matrix Plus) and independent control plane (JCS1200). Juniper T1600 also became the first product to deliver a commercial implementation of the critically acclaimed 100GE interface (802.3ba) with beta trials starting Q4 2009.

Leadership

Starting from 1996, Juniper Networks was led by Scott Kriens, an industry veteran and formerly VP of Sales at StrataCom, who is believed to be behind the early company's commercial success with UUNET, Verio and vBNS.[13] Although being highly visible in 1999-2003 timeframe, Scott Kriens became largely inactive between 2004 and 2007[14] until eventually stepping down in 2008. Scott remained on the company payroll as the Chairman of the Board for Juniper Networks with annual compensation totaling $3,958,110.00 in 2008.[15] Kevin Johnson,[16] former chief of Microsoft's platform and services division, became the third CEO of Juniper in July 2008[17][18][19] succeeding Scott Kriens. After becoming a CEO, Mr. Johnson almost immediately had to deal with the effects of the downturn, but famously decided against the cuts in $800 million R&D budget.[20] This decision seemingly fueled Juniper performance well into the next decade with new products like MX 3D and SRX.

Acquisition history

Juniper did not acquire a company for the first three years of its existence. In November 1999, Juniper acquired Layer Five, an intellectual property design firm for $19 million.[21] In December 2000, Juniper acquired ASIC design firm Micro Magic Inc., for $260 million in stocks and cash.[22] November 2001 saw the acquisition of the CMTS startup Pacific Broadband Communications for $200 million.[23] In May 2002, Juniper bought the intellectual property of Nexsi Systems.[24] In July 2002 Unisphere Networks, a subsidiary of Siemens, was acquired for $740 million.[25]

April 2004 saw the company's largest purchase: a $4 billion acquisition for NetScreen Technologies (which had previously acquired Neoteris)[26]. In April 2005, Kagoor Networks was acquired for $65.7 million.[27] In July 2005, Juniper acquired two companies: Peribit Networks($337 million)[28][29] and Redline Networks ($132 million).[29] Acorn Packet Solutions was acquired in October 2005 for $8.7 million.[30][31] In December 2005, Juniper acquired Funk Software for $122 million.[32] In April 2010, Juniper announced it would acquire Ankeena Networks for under $100 million.[33]

Juniper demonstrated mixed success with acquisition efforts. During 4Q2008 earnings call[34], former Unisphere products (E-series) were still quoted as significant source of revenue, while Juniper SLT division (originally built with NetScreen products) was credited with record revenue of $246 million. At the same time, products acquired with Pacific Broadband (G-series), Kagoor Networks (SBC), Peribit (WX platform), Redline (DX platform) and Funk Software (SBR appliance) experienced short lifecycles.[35]

Principal Subsidiaries

The principal subsidiaries of Juniper Networks Inc., US includes Juniper Networks K.K. (Japan), Juniper Networks B.V. (Netherlands), Juniper Networks International Limited (Cayman Islands), Juniper Networks FSC Inc. (Barbados), Juniper Networks U.K. Ltd. (United Kingdom), Juniper Networks GmbH (Germany), Juniper Networks France Sarl (France), Juniper Networks Australia Ltd. (Australia), Juniper Networks Hong Kong Ltd. (Hong Kong), Juniper Networks South Asia Ltd. (Hong Kong), Juniper Networks China Ltd. (Hong Kong), Juniper Networks Canada Inc. (Canada), Juniper Acquisition Corporation; Juniper Networks International, Inc and Juniper Networks India Pvt Ltd (India).[36]

Products

Network Operating Systems

Router products

M40 of M-series was the first product by Juniper Networks, which was released in 1998.[39] The M40 was the first of its kind product, capable of forwarding packets in entirely silicon, without support from the general-purpose CPUs. This was achieved by using a proprietary chipset codenamed "ABC". The chipset consisted of three ASIC types, "A", for high-speed switching, "B" for L2 processing and memory interface and "C" for L3 services, together forming a packet processing engine (PFE). The PFE also included shared packet memory, a single packet forwarding table, and a one-write, one-read architecture.The entire PFE was capable of forwarding at 40 Mpps, a capacity more than 100 times faster than that of any other available router architectures at that time.[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] Many features of M40 (such as separation of control and forwarding plane and modular OS) has formed the industry standard.

The E series routers run the JUNOSe operating system inherited from acquisition of Unisphere.
The J, M, T, and MX series routers run JUNOS.

While the E, M, and T series are all high speed ASIC based devices capable of terminating multiple broadband optical connections, the J series forwarding plane is partially software-driven. Capable of terminating DS3 (45 Mbit/s) and slower lines, the J-series product line heavily draws from the modern multicore CPU technology and is aimed at corporate branch offices and service provider premise equipment. In the fall of 2006, the J series got a refresh of the modular products offering significantly increased performance to meet updated WAN technologies requirements. In the same announcement Juniper shared that it would co-operate with Avaya to integrate Avaya IP Telephony in the J series of routers.

Switch products

Security products

Other products

Discontinued products

Juniper Networks Technical Certification Program

The Juniper Networks Technical Certification Program (JNTCP) was introduced by Juniper Networks, Inc. and intended for attaining proficiency in Juniper line of products. The certifications are divided into several levels based on skill level requirement.

Awards and recognitions

In 2009, Juniper makes debut on Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work for.[1]

Juniper received the Association of Support Professionals The Years Ten Best Web Support Sites award [6] in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009

Criticisms and controversy

Stock Options backdating

Juniper Networks was subject to a investigation and a major scandal on stock options backdating, which reportedly benefited senior executives.[50] The investigation on this matter started in 2006 (under CEO Scott Kriens) and ended in Feb 2010 (under CEO Kevin Johnson) Juniper agreed to pay $169m to settle a class-action civil suit.[51] During the investigation, Juniper delayed financial results and got delisting notice from NASDAQ. Coincidentally, Juniper wrote off $1.3 billion in "goodwill" for the quarter ended June 30, 2006.[52]

No one appeared to be named responsible for the wrongdoing; however, Juniper replaced CFO in August 2007 and Scott Kriens finally stepped down from CEO role later in 2008.

References

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External links