The emerging market for white box network elements is a business opportunity for Juniper Networks, according to the router vendor's CEO Rami Rahim.

In an exclusive video interview with Light Reading's founder and CEO Steve Saunders, Rahim says Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) already has a product in the market to take advantage of demand for white box systems.

That's in stark contrast to Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO): Its outgoing CEO John Chambers expects white box vendors to become Cisco's main competitors during the next ten years. (See CEO Chat With John Chambers, Cisco, Cisco's Robbins to Replace Chambers as CEO and How Cisco Will Compete Against White Box Switches.)

"If we play our cards right, [white box] can be an opportunity for us," Juniper's CEO tells Light Reading. "We embraced the concept of a white box and became the first really proven network vendor with a battle-hardened operating system to offer a white box solution, an OCP-compliant white box called the OCX1100, running our operating system… we announced it last year and began offering it very recently. We can be disruptive to take a more meaningful and significant market share." (See Juniper Introduces Open Compute Switch.)

The strategy is bold, given that white box systems are set to become a lower-cost and more agile alternative to the type of proprietary hardware that Juniper has been selling to network operators, enterprises and web services companies for years.

See the full interview below, during which Rahim discusses the need for hardware and Juniper's approach to cloud and open networking.

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— Ray Le Maistre, , Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading