Even before the global financial meltdown of 2009, the financial services industry (FSI) was saddled with an alphabet soup of compliance requirements. Given recent events in financial services, there’s no doubt compliance requirements and additional legislation are looming at the state, federal and global levels. Read more...

Today, O'Reilly Media released  the latest book for the Juniper Networks Technical Library - The Sustainable Network by Sarah Sorenson. The book does a wonderful job answering the question of "what technologies do we need to solve the complex environmental, economic, social and political challenges facing us today?" As this thought-provoking book reveals, one tool for enacting changes is already at our fingertips: the global network.

Today Cisco announced a series of updated Integrated Services Router (ISR G2) products for branch office applications. The ISR line has been on the market for over 5 years now and we've been expecting new branch products from Cisco for quite some time. And since this announcement follows the release of our own award winning SRX Series Services Gateways for the branch by a couple of quarters, I could be accused of being more interested than most . Read more...

There certainly is a lot of hype around Cloud Computing. It ranks at the very top of the overused terms thrown around by the marketeers. Do a Google News search and you'll see more than 6,000 unique stories in the past month on cloud computing. However the concept behind the cloud is quite real. Very simply, it represents the natural evolution of IT infrastructure - towards virtualization. Read more...

As with all good things, the CE World Congress comes to an end today. The main part of the agenda was the MEF 21 Award Ceremony, which took place this morning. Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) is responsible for setting up test specifications for several standards and certifies them. More information about this process can be found here. Read more...

Last evening, as you may remember me mentioning yesterday, we had a really enjoyable MEF award dinner last night. It was great to have a fabulous chat with our partners and customers. As it is to be expected of such things, it went on very late and the adrenalin kick didn’t quite subside till this morning when our forums reconvened. Read more...

Today is the first “official” day at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress, with the sun shining on Berlin to make the setting perfect. The weather wasn’t the only thing that left me feeling very ebullient today, as we also took part in some very interesting panels. Read more...

Hello everyone. The countdown is finally over. David here on the first (private) day of the CEWC 2009 in Berlin, the largest event for the Ethernet networks and service industry. This year, the congress is all about bringing Value-Added Services to the Carrier Ethernet environment. Read more...

I recently met with a customer who explained a concept they called rack-and-roll that is made possible by Virtual Chassis technology for the EX4200 line of switches. Read more...

What a way to end Broadband World Forum Europe 2009! Today, Juniper Networks hosted a panel discussion looking at evolving the data center model and was also present on a further three panels. As the chairman of Juniper's panel discussion, data centers are a topic close to my heart. Indeed, with the growth of content-rich services such as IPTV and Web2.0 over the past four years, most of the data on the network is hosted in data centers, which makes the topic particularly interesting for today's telecoms sector. It certainly sparked some interesting ideas from the panelists! Read more...

Following yesterday's Infovision award win read about the win here and the announcement of our joint venture with Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) that addresses the Carrier Ethernet market today read the press release, the Juniper stand (#417) has been abuzz with customers and prospects keen to know more about the offering. The main question that we've been asked is why the solution is relevant to end users. A good challenge that I thought I'd tackle in today's post. Read more...

Fiber to the home (or FTTH as it is more affectionately called in our industry) has been a point of discussion for many years and the topic popped up again at this year's Broadband World Forum Europe earlier today. This is not least because Europe's FTTH Council produced its annual survey showing that more than two million people in Europe now have fiber broadband direct to their home - an 18% growth over the last survey compiled in late 2008. Read more...

It won't have escaped our industry peers that today was the opening of the Broadband World Forum Europe 2009 in sunny Paris. And it seems the sunshine has inspired the keynote speakers with positive viewpoints on our industry. The keynote address that impressed me the most was from Jean-Philippe Vanot, Senior Executive Vice President, Innovation and Marketing at Orange, who discussed how the ICT industry could provide a solution to the financial crisis. Indeed, this picks up from a theme initiated by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) in an August 2009 report that said that ICTs had been hard hit by the financial crisis but that they are to play a key role in the recovery. Internet related businesses are faring better than the electronics or semiconductor industries but on the whole, investments in R&D and innovation are clearly seen as necessary for future competitiveness and the development of new growth areas. This in turn leads to job generation and a positive impact on GDP. Read more...

Crack open the champagne! I am delighted to share with you that Juniper Networks and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) have won the "Network and Services Management and Operations" category of the Infovision Awards 2009. The awards were announced today at the Broadband World Forum Europe 2009 in Paris. Read more...

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Network engineering is a constantly evolving art. The capabilities and features supported on routers, switches and security devices are ever changing and moving forward; each new protocol and capability is developed to support a new user activity, a new type of traffic, or to solve a newly emerging problem. Read more...

When I think about the Broadband Stimulus programs which the US federal government is currently funding, I realize that it’s not just about getting bits-and-bytes out to underserved areas, or creating middle-mile networks to reach key locations: universities, hospitals, libraries, county seats, research and technology centers, etc. It’s about connecting more parts of the US society, so we can collaborate better, communicate better, and share services over a shared network. Read more...

In my last blog entry Parallelism and the role of 100GE I discussed how for some classes of computation/networking there is a symbiosis between the parallelism of a computation engine (a server, desktop, handset) and the effective parallelism of a network: the ability to send more bits within a given time interval by increasing the serialization rate. The comments made there were most directly relevant to transactional processing / short messages. Read more...

The recession is driving many changes in our lives. People are more cautious with spend decisions as they re-evaluate their priorities. For service providers, the recession has also necessitated sharper focus on priorities. In some cases, proven solutions may be favored over new innovations, and investments toward tactical projects with near term returns may be weighed against spending on more strategic efforts. While this re-examination is a vital and necessary, decisions are never easy because innovation is hard to justify in tough economic times. This is where I believe pragmatic innovation can deliver both near term and strategic benefits.

I was reading "The Innovator's Solution" by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor which touches upon the factors leading to commoditization in an industry. The authors write that when products are good enough to meet customer needs, the industry starts evolving toward commoditization - provided there are no barriers to entry. On the other hand when products are not good enough, it creates an opportunity for vendor innovation and growth. Read more...

At a very coarse level, the two aspects of information transfer that impact performance the most have historically been signal propagation delays and information serialization delays. At large distances, serialization delays (the time it takes to encode an information bit on to a signal) have become irrelevant. Compare, for example, a serialization delay of 1x10-11 seconds for 10GE to the 20x10-3 seconds for a signal to propagate across a large continent; add another order of magnitude reduction for serialization when considering 100GE. Read more...

Spring time... I always feel like there is a lot of pressure in the air that sort of builds up over the cold and wet winter months and charges at us with force of a Niagara Falls. We are feeling squashed by it and rush for remedy that can help us survive this mass of urgent things to do in our work and personal lives. Many of these remedies are not helping, most of them lead to yet another thing to do and make this whirlpool of events spin faster. Only very few remedies actually work! Solutions to our problems that leave us satisfied with ourselves and others... What makes a difference? The classic management theory is teaching us that solutions to our problems should be effective, efficient and economic. Three e-words which make whole lot of a difference in our lives. Read more...

Space is the most fundamental characteristic of the universe we live in. If we existed in an infinitely small singularity, the need for networks would not exist. However, we do not, and as a result the resources of the universe are scattered and continually rearranged in four dimensional spacetime. As we scatter and rearrange ourselves in four dimensional spacetime we take our own organic storage, processing, transfer, process/applications, information, and energy resources with us (our brains and bodies), and we often complement those resources with computer-based resources that are capable of operating over large distances. As we look for greater productivity, efficiencies, and lower costs we also explore the benefits of centralized processing which our distributed and increasingly mobile terminals connect to. As we go about utilizing all these resources we have to consider the fifth dimension of economics, the sixth dimension of consumption preference, the seventh dimension of cultural/political preference, and no doubt countless other dimensions as well. Read more...

In the next entry I will conclude this series of thoughts on network value. First I would like to say a few things about mobility and security. Read more...

In order for network value to grow over time there must be a constructive tension between the productivity of known forms of value and the discovery of new forms of value, i.e. between productive efficiency and allocative efficiency (see Network Value III - Allocative Efficiency). One way to achieve that is to have a constructive tension between managed services (services where there is a strong link between service quality, resource allocation, security, and customer experience), and unmanaged services (where the emphasis is on shared resources, openness, and adhoc discovery). Read more...

Much of business is about improving the economics of forms of value that have already been discovered; enabling known valuable combinations of resources to come together faster, cheaper, and in greater supply; in other words productive efficiency. Healthy systems are not only efficient in how they use resources but they are also efficient in what they allocate resources to, ensuring resources are allocated in the most valuable way (in accordance with consumer wishes). The orthodox understanding of market systems is that the price system ensures that resources are allocated in the most valuable ways. Consumers pay the most for what they value the most and then they make marginal purchases for other things they value less. Putting aside for now arguments about the distortions caused by monopolies, imperfect information, regulation, and various views on socially optimal pricing, there is the more fundamental issue of how do consumers discover value in the first place? Read more...

When my 20-something niece set up a full blown web site for her wedding with blogs, pictures, videos, maps, hotel references, wedding registry, and twitter postings, I could only think of one thing: Broadband. Read more...

I am a big fan of getting away from the office to meet with customers and there is nothing better than getting really far away. Fifty-five hundred miles away, customers are less likely to be influenced by creative marketing and face real challenges making the decision to switch to Juniper for their network infrastructure solutions. Read more...

James Staten, principal analyst of Forrester Research, invited me to be one of the five members of a panel on data center networking economics at the Blade Systems Insight conference in April in Las Vegas. After authoring the tagline that "Juniper will simultaneously advance the fundamentals and economics of networking, I couldn't resist. I will attempt to bring you into the room so you too can benefit from the valuable dialog that ensued. Read more...

The average frequency of information being accurate, sufficient, and timely is one way to look at productivity. Expanding and extending those thoughts in this entry I want to look at the three fundamental economic layers (as opposed to protocol layers) of any network, namely: capacity, capacity management, and capacity usage. Read more...