I guess I'd be desperate too if my smartest and most talented employees went to the competition.
Not to be outdone, Juniper dealt a huge blow to Cisco last month, hiring top Cisco engineer Yakov Rekhter. Industry watchers predict that other key Cisco engineers are sure to follow Rekhter, a brilliant talent and leading expert in the networking field. "Cisco let Juniper play in its backyard, as long as they behaved," says Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at C.E. Unterberg. "But now Juniper is hurting them in a very critical market, and Cisco's radar is up....
Juniper quickly wooed top talent away from Cisco, Sun, Xerox and other firms. The biggest catch was Tony Li, a brilliant Cisco engineer who nailed his resignation letter to his boss's door with a baseball bat...
Juniper's engineers built powerful routers that can handle high volumes of data traffic demanded by Internet and telecom firms. In contrast, analysts say, Cisco's Internet routers are 10-year-old gear for corporate computer networks that were updated for the Net. "
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