Juniper's massive mobile market assault

Stuart Corner
Monday, 15 February 2010 08:23

Business IT - Technology

Juniper Networks has made a series of announcements at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona of products and partnerships targeted at every segment of mobile communication - from network core to client software for handsets - and which it claims represents a different, holistic approach to the problems of scale, bandwidth demand and security confronting mobile network operators.

Juniper's "new network" for mobility is, it says, "designed to address rapidly changing customer behaviours and expectations, while dramatically improving total costs and revenue opportunities for service providers [using] open standards and flexible software platforms that will enable mobile operators to handle a broad range of devices, applications and customer needs."

Juniper has sought to differentiate its approach to mobile networks and disparage current, rival offerings with Kim Perdikou, newly appointed executive vice president, Office of the CEO, saying: "Mobile operators need their networking vendors to stop building new one-off boxes, band-aids and bolt-ons to handle mobile data traffic. They need networking vendors with real innovation that can offer immediate TCO relief, unmatched scale for the future, built-in security and open platforms to monetise new services."

In support of its approach, Juniper quotes Stéphane Téral, principal analyst, mobile and FMC infrastructure at Infonetics Research, saying: "Juniper is offering a differentiated approach to mobile networking, which is tackling the issue of traffic congestion in the core at the right time and in the right part of the network...In addition to providing mobile operators with an evolution path to 4G technologies, Juniper is addressing today's requirements for scaling, securing and enabling broadband services for continued revenue growth."

At the heart of the new offerings are Juniper's SRX Series Services Gateways security devices and MX 3D Series universal edge routers. These form the basis of a number of applications developed by Juniper and a range of partners designed to "help mobile operators deploy truly open and secure mobile networks based on Junos software."

CONTINUED