This week, an industry competitor unleashed a campaign aimed directly at Juniper. It certainly made for an interesting Monday. While we are flattered by the attention, we are not fazed by this publicity stunt and instead feel inspired that our approach is being validated.
The timing of this stunt was not surprising given Juniper hosted a technology day for Wall Street financial analysts who are in town for the annual financial analyst meetings with several technology companies (including Cisco). One of the criticisms we received yesterday was centered on Juniper “overpromising” and “underdelivering.” Coincidentally, at our technology day, we presented a suite of demos that showed the very technology that competition said we weren’t delivering, including: MobileNext, QFabric, T4000, 100GE in core and edge. Wall Street seemed to either not notice or not care about the swipe taken at us on Monday. Of the 100 or so analysts that attended our event, not a single one asked a question about Monday’s competitive antics or even mentioned them. On the contrary, they were highly interested and focused on our innovation and technology. I doubt that this was the result our competition was hoping for.
It seems that frustration may have gotten the best of the group that launched this marketing stunt directed at us yesterday. Just look at what’s happened over the last few years. Wall Street, industry analysts, partners and customers have embraced our innovation story and increasingly consider Juniper the innovation benchmark. Over the last few years, competitors have seemed to become resigned to the fact they were at least a generation behind Juniper in core routing, but now it’s happening in edge, the data center, mobility and security. Pretty much across every area of networking. And most importantly, Juniper is seen as the thought leader by many. Since the competition couldn’t beat us on the innovation scale, I guess they decided to attack our credibility.
Time will tell if this approach will work. It’s a risky strategy though, and one that rarely resonates with customers, the group that we at Juniper are dedicated to. As far as some of the criticisms of us, I won’t go into detail, but will say many were just false or odd to bring up. As an example, pre-announcing products was one thing we were attacked for. Early product announcements are not an anomaly in our industry. After all, network build-out and upgrade cycles are very long, and as a vendor, you want to make sure your customers know what products you have in development. Its part of the commitment a vendor owes their customers (and partners). And despite the accusations thrown at us yesterday, we have a proven track record of delivering on our promises. Competition tried to cleverly confuse “project” announcements with “product” announcements. Our Stratus and Falcon announcements highlighted our intention to develop new solutions and architectures to solve the challenges in data center and mobile networking. The QFabric and MobileNext announcement subsequently identified the products that were the result of these innovation cycles, and both shipped on time. MobileNext shipped last quarter, QFabric this week.
Again, while this attention has been flattering, Juniper continues to focus, innovate and bring to life the New Network. We are committed to our promise to transform the economies and experience of networking for our customers. It’s a great time to be part of Juniper and involved with the innovation behind the NEW Network. We are changing the Network. We are changing the industry.
Rami Rahim (RamiRahim)
on:
The Next Chapter in the Converged Supercore
