I agree that they need to really begin to focus "elsewhere". Carriers may be spending somewhat again and the "convergence" play is going to help...although the realities of that are another story. I am also surprised they have not yet announced an enterprise product. Maybe they did not want this to deter from the great quarter.
However, you mention make them a billion dollar company for real. If I am not mistaken they did over 700M for the year 2003. Wasn't this supposed to be a bad year? To reach almost a billion is nothing to YAWN about. I expect if they don't make a seriously poor acquistion they have the chance to do over 1B in 04. With the govt. wins especially.
re: Juniper Confidently Carries Q4So their business is recovering. Yawn. I want to hear about how Juniper becomes Cisco like. They need a switch, they need an enterprise play, some kind of story that tells the investment community how they will survive the as an independent company and grow back into a billion dollar company for real. All I hear is bulls_it like "we like to focus on what we do well: routing." Again, YAWN.
Still love ya Juniper, but you gotta show us something, especially because your technology leadership in both the core and the edge will be seriously in jeopardy within the year of 2004. In the core, Procket and "whatever" out of Cisco will be there and in the edge, Laurel and Alcatel (Timetra) will be challenging. What you gonna do?
re: Juniper Confidently Carries Q4Wiley, With over $200M/q run rate now, and a book-to-bill over 1:1, a billion dollars in revenue for 04 appears to be in the bag.
Paying off those $400M in converts also implies they anticipate a big share price increase, so paying a premium to get those out of the way would be worthwhile. (I have not checked the conversion price, that would be intersting to know).
I wonder, however, why they need an enterprise strategy? Do they really need to copy CSCO, or can they do something different, more service provider oriented? Is the world not changing? What does Laurel have that they need? I also wonder, with that legacy IOS code, how easy is it for CSCO to scale in the core? Just wondering.
re: Juniper Confidently Carries Q4My 2 cents... With more carrier spending going to packet equipment it seems more logical that they would stay focused on the carrier market. In fact Kriens has said this again and again.
Why would they risk a massive catfight with Cisco in the enterprise market just as things are improving in their home base of the carrier world? With VOIP, cable telephony, and edge routing there's plenty of room for growth in new carrier packet products.
re: Juniper Confidently Carries Q4So their stock is up $7 today. Amazing. Ridiculous, but amazing. Back to triple digit P/Es. Oh well, bubbles are cool.
All I'm saying is that Juniper remains a one trick pony. They need to diversify. I've been saying it for years: they lose their technology lead in routing, they die. Simple as that. I don't know how they'll do it, but I know they have to do it. They are ekeing out a living right now. The numbers look good but they are still carrying tons of debt and relative to their competitor, their balance sheet is basically zero. $23B in cash vs. what, $800M less $400M in debt? Haven't looked at the balance sheet. Whatever. Point is, they need big growth engines and there ain't no big growth segments to be had in carrier/ISP.
By the way, Cisco sells about $6B of their 1996 built Catalyst products (4000 to 6000) through the carrier channel, and the enterprises are starting to ask for new technologies: hence, Foundry's success right in a key Cisco segment. The logic goes like this: Juniper, replicate Cisco's enterprise success which is partially driven by the presence of IOS in ISP networks. You've got lots of boxes running JUNOS out there. Why not tell enterprise customers why running JUNOS all the way to the LAN makes sense. It's a helluva lot better OS than IOS.
Go buy Foundry, if Bobby will sell, and Juniper becomes a multi billion dollar company in three years, at Cisco's expense.
I agree that they need to really begin to focus "elsewhere". Carriers may be spending somewhat again and the "convergence" play is going to help...although the realities of that are another story. I am also surprised they have not yet announced an enterprise product. Maybe they did not want this to deter from the great quarter.
However, you mention make them a billion dollar company for real. If I am not mistaken they did over 700M for the year 2003. Wasn't this supposed to be a bad year? To reach almost a billion is nothing to YAWN about. I expect if they don't make a seriously poor acquistion they have the chance to do over 1B in 04. With the govt. wins especially.
Pat