Juniper's Marketing Mystery

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russ4br 12/5/2012 | 4:10:06 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery What would you do about marketing strategy, if you were Juniper?

- get rid of the cartoons
- get rid of the "Enterprise Infranet" story
- hire a Marketing VP

-russ

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Scott Raynovich 12/5/2012 | 4:10:06 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery Question for the audience: What would you do about marketing strategy, if you were Juniper?

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underscore 12/5/2012 | 4:10:05 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery > Question for the audience: What would you do
> about marketing strategy, if you were Juniper?

A bit less grand "strategy" and a whole lot more of grunt work. As you mentioned, juniper needs to answer the question "what it's boxes can do to packets that competitors can't do".

That means for instance that a customer needs to understand for a given problem space what juniper's products can do and in which way they are different. In some cases juniper still has some technical advantages... but you couldn't tell it from looking at the information in their web site.

If you are a customer looking for solutions in some particular space you can tipically go to cisco's web site and find useful information.
You typically find several articles that explain both the general concepts and gives you details
about the tools they have available and how to use them. Go to juniper's web site and you find... nothing.

IPTV is a good example... juniper has actual deployments in this space. But you can't find any technical info on what their solutions are and in which way they meet your requirements.

It is actually an interactive process: explaining the solutions that you have for a given problem space helps you understand what holes exist and find ways to fix it. But all this requires a lot of hard work...

It is much easier to bash your competitors in an infantile way. Or to stategise about "packet processing".

Another good tip for juniper would probably be to stop making aquisitions all over the map and attempt to build contiguos product segments, even if they don't all have same margins.

If you are trying to leverage your sales force, having them go all over the map and have to talk to completly different people to sell different products isn't all that productive.

_

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rifleshot 12/5/2012 | 4:10:04 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery Let me suggest that Juniper doesn\'t have a marketing problem. It has a leadership problem.
The elephant in the room is that Juniper\'s founders don\'t scale as a large company.

The bigger picture is that Juniper and Cisco are in a single-digit growth rut. And both companies are prepared to make big bets to accelerate their growth trajectory.

This is why I love the future for networking start-ups. Juniper and Cisco will write big checks to start-ups to get their mojo back.

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Scott Raynovich 12/5/2012 | 4:10:03 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery Okay... but not sure what part of the column you are critiquing. The primary point is Juniper needs a new marketing program... and they need to do it quickly and seriuosly. So is that what you are disagreeing with?

I made no comments on JUNOS, outages, or anyting like that. In fact one of the points I did make is that Juniper has a great reputation in the S.P. market but that they are gong to have to do more than just try to ride those coattails to penetrate the enterprise market, which is what they say they want to do now. So you're saying the new message should be built around JUNOS?

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jobseeker 12/5/2012 | 4:10:03 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery Scott your remark(s) are interesting and somewhat misleading. ItGÇÖs difficult trying to make a comparison, given the time frame , technological advance(s) and market requirements. Just so you clearly know I happen to like the Juniper product portfolio and I believe their doing a good job given the market conditions.

I donGÇÖt need to explain the JUNOS operating systems, it speaks for itself and as the SP & Ent requirements become more demanding, the hardware will follow.

If you analyze your entire argument from a SP business prospective... how many outage(s) did SP have over the the last two decades. How many are vendor specific ? Juniper was created because the market required reliable routing software and to be frank their just starting. Correct me if I am wrong but ten years in arguably the toughest market must means something.

I like CiscoGÇÖs switching gear and believes it one of their best hardware asset. Although Cisco has dominated the routing domain, they cannot disregard their competitor(s) and how they differentiate software features and keep in mind their dominance was established during a period when their wasnGÇÖt an option... IE Microsoft vs Linux. Please note I am not bashing Cisco whatsoever but I think the market requires more and not dependent on a specific vendor.

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Scott Raynovich 12/5/2012 | 4:10:03 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery Thanks, interesting analysis.

I'm curious, do marketing pros in Silicon Valley have standard metrics for things like internal Web page design, white papers, e.t.c. For example, if you have $X revenue, you need X% to produce Web marketing materials.

It does seem like Cisco spends more than anybody else on this stuff and it would be interesting to try to look at some metrics on this. If anybody knows who I can talk to about it please let me know.

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underscore 12/5/2012 | 4:10:03 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery > Juniper was created because the market required
> reliable routing software and to be frank their
> just starting

My recollection is quite different. When juniper was started cisco's high end box was the 7500... GSR being in the works. At the time all IP networks where running on top of ATM because there where no router in the market that could switch IP traffic at the required performance.

Juniper changed this radically and forced cisco out of its slumber... initially with the OC16 card for the GSR which came out just before the M40 (Engine 0 was marketed as oc48 but could just barelly do over oc12... the usual wags where going around calling it the oc16 card).

A few years latter and ATM in the core was history. Effectivly this was big big change...

Hard to find a similar parallel at the moment... there may be opportunities but they are not so visible.

I do happen to agree with you that juniper's potential for competing over cisco is now much more in software than in hardware...

As cisco continutes to make a complete mess of its software. How many different router OSes at the moment ? IOS, ION, XR, BCN, any thing else ? I've lost track. Must have an empire for every senior VP in the land.

It is also unclear if juniper's software advantage over cisco's train wreck has been by design or accidental. Perhaps a bit of both...

They managed to establish a pretty decent model for how to manage software releases from the beginning. On the other hand its quite unclear if they are doing much in terms of evolving the software rather than just adding more and more features (and more bugs along with it). Will it become and unmanagable mess like IOS in the future ? or will they manage to escape that fate and use that their differentiator in the enterprise space ? Place your bets, folks.

_

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jobseeker 12/5/2012 | 4:10:02 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery I am not saying the entire discussion should be built around the JUNOS but it should be noted the same SP - OS is available to the Enterprise space. How do you feel about JuniperGÇÖs security solution namely the Netscreen products? ItGÇÖs selling extremely well in the SP and enterprise space.

I do agree the marketing position is important and Juniper likes to hire quality people. ItGÇÖs not a big company and I donGÇÖt believe they have any intention of becoming enormous .... but efficient. Juniper and their competitor(s) like to hire one another and maybe someone of importance is abandoning ship.

You canGÇÖt expect Juniper to produce a layer two switch because LR say so. I think Cisco competitors are chewing away at their routing dominance and it takes time for the enterprise, especially given the market conditions. Cisco has very good enterprise switches and they sell well.

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scooby 12/5/2012 | 4:10:02 AM

re: Juniper's Marketing Mystery IDC tracks it.

And for an interesting perspective, check out the "Tech Takes Back the Market" article in CMO Magazine.

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