Juniper revamps marketing to take on Cisco in the enterprise

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 17 June 2009 01:47

IT Industry - Strategy

Page said that the addition of switches to Juniper's product portfolio last year had doubled the company's addressable market. "The market for routers and security products that we could address at the beginning of 2008 was worth about $US400m. With the addition of switches that went to in excess of $US1b."

Aiming for the number two slot
That market is dominated by Cisco with close to 80 percent, and according to Page not necessarily directly accessible. "The people that have done exceedingly well in that market [ie Cisco] typically don't sell switches, they sell voice, video, data applications but there is a whole range of switching infrastructure that needs to go in with that."

Page doesn't claim any aspirations to unseat Cisco, saying "We don't aim to be number one but we believe we are emerging as a very viable number two," However getting there is likely to be much tougher than Juniper's meteoric rise from start up to number two in service provider routing. "I have a number of friends who work for our competitors," he said. "And the comments I get are that they did not see us coming in the service provider space, but in the enterprise and public sector markets they certainly see us coming and they are going to do everything they can to keep us out of that space - However my view that, at the end of the day the customer decides."

Stuart Corner travelled to Juniper's partner summit as a guest of Juniper Networks.