re: Juniper's Ethernet Strategy EmergingThanks, LR, for writing an article on this, but this is old news. If anything, it's probably leaked by Juniper as a marketing ploy to hold customers from buying Cisco or Alcatel, thinking the Juniper box will be much better.
The box is still in development and it won't be available for at least 6 months. At the meantime, Juniper is coming out with a dense gigabit ethernet on their M/T routers to try to stop the bleeding from customers who have figured out they can achieve the same functions using Cisco 7600s at a much lower cost per gigabit ethernet port.
As for the switch, it's targeted for the metro market, and Juniper will spin vpls and qos as its strength versus Cisco and Alcatel.
re: Juniper's Ethernet Strategy EmergingBecause it will reduce their margins. All of their products are 55-70% margin. Ethernet switching is inherently lower margin due to competition. The margin is in the 30-50% range or worse. They only want to cherry pick the high margin businesses in enterprise and service provider. This strategy however will not last as they lose business to true "solutions". They need to partner heavily with Lucent, Siemens, Ericsson to compete and eventually this will not work anymore.
re: Juniper's Ethernet Strategy EmergingWhen is Juniper going to get its act together? You know what they say about what the rising tide covers? A lot of rocks ahead for Juniper. Yeah i know they have a lot of momentum but it's deceptive.
This company is not integrating its acquisitions at all, despite the rosy spin they are putting on things. They lost the entire Netscreen sales force, and now the technical brains have left. Kittu is gone and all they have is a shell of a company that is fast losing its edge, and they paid more than the entire market's value for that class of product for that empty shell. They don't have overlay sales teams selling the peribit, redline or kagoor products. The channel is shaky at best. It's still a router company after they spent, what, $4.5B on acquisitions over the last couple of years?
They still don't have a WLAN product, are still nowhere near having a data center strategy, no storage plan. Do they even have a plan at all? What's worse, having no plan or not being able to execute your plan? They are becoming a laughing stock out there and yet everyone talks about what a kick ass company they are.
Juniper will lose its momentum just when Cisco is finally vulnerable and losing the final few strong, smart, hard working people they have. Too bad to see a great opportunity wasted.
re: Juniper's Ethernet Strategy EmergingWell, honestly, today I don't feel like hating on them. I hope they do well even though they have a CEO with a crooked smile and venture capitalism represents everything I hate. 7,000,000 years ago apes climbed out of trees and now we have Juniper and all the other folks who think they have a clue. Homo Erectus and Goliath would be proud. Likely Juniper management would kill them and eat them. I wish them luck with their superior victory in Ethernet. I really, really, really, need another Ethernet vendor. We are really liking the Cisco SD2005 5 port switch on our engineers desks! Supports 10/100/1000 and we got them for 20 bucks a port! Of course the FastIron's, BigIron:s, and Catalysts in the network were bit more expensive back in the day... Common hurry up!
re: Juniper's Ethernet Strategy EmergingThe company is living on past reputation and borrowed time. Good analogy on rising tide masking the rocks beneath the surface. Within the company, products are getting delayed and quality has slipped. Even this Ethernet switch is 9 months behind. Good engineers have been frusfrated with the management, who are basically yes men with little experience. All they do is go to meetings and claim credit on other people's work.
re: Juniper's Ethernet Strategy EmergingYou know, Scott K used to work for John C, but he is no John at all, not even close. Scott is getting over his head. He literally fired those who disagreed with him. He never really figured out how to do acquisitions properly. Like you said, it is only a good looking distraction while he piles up his own money in the bank.
As for strategy, J is never really a company that is capable of competing in low margin biz. Starting from the engineering mentality to the mkt force: they always start out with the cost story, then everybody starts to bitch about features, then the cost will just blow out of the window, then they could not sell the piece of the gear (because it is too expensive and has features that customers don't need), then they start blaming each other. So, classic. They just can't execute in this low margin biz.
I heard they have or had an ethernet switching strategy, but their custom switch fabric is just way too expensive.
As for the storage, Scott is experimenting with this non-direct spin-in thing with xsigo, which is led by former engr VP at J. It remains to be seen if it will get any traction.
re: Juniper's Ethernet Strategy EmergingThe 7450 is a stripped down version of the 7750. It can do everything the 7750 does except BGP, so no IP-VPN. It also lacks the NSR HA feature. Price per port is reasonably OK.
Juniper needs to wake up before itGÇÖs too late. They need a ME optimized box and it has to be cheap. Last time I checked, the list price of a GigE port on an M series box was 19K. You can get a 16 port GigE on the 7600 for less than 15K (list price).
this is old news. If anything, it's probably
leaked by Juniper as a marketing ploy to hold
customers from buying Cisco or Alcatel, thinking
the Juniper box will be much better.
The box is still in development and it won't be available for at least 6 months. At the meantime, Juniper is coming out with a dense gigabit ethernet on their M/T routers to try to stop
the bleeding from customers who have figured out they can achieve the same functions using Cisco
7600s at a much lower cost per gigabit ethernet port.
As for the switch, it's targeted for the metro
market, and Juniper will spin vpls and qos as
its strength versus Cisco and Alcatel.