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Technology Stocks : Juniper Networks - JNPR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (421)	7/31/1999 3:44:00 PM
From: Wizard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3350

JNPR vs CIEN, One crucial difference between Ciena and Juniper; Ciena does WDM equipment which is basically at an aggregated point and performs transmission through conversion to light. This means that getting installed at Sprint or anywhere else is nice but your architecture doesn't need to integrate with anything but two points, the transmission from point A to point B. Cisco was built with protocols that became a standard and everyone had to interface with Cisco routers, A^n + B^n +...x^n. (quant jocks please correct my math). Ciena, because it did direct backbone transmission, does not have this same advantage. My point is that either you benefit from the 'network effect' as Cisco did or you don't (Ciena doesn't). The key to Ciena was continuing to win new sales at Sprint and their other customers as it was a buyers decision which box was to transmit data that had already been aggregated and didn't need to interface with every other point on the internet. This seems like a technical difference but it is a very, very important difference. Slugging it out with monster companies every time there is a performance bake-off is a tough way to build a business unless you have some important advantage. Ciena had a very tough assignment and they could have won the deals but didn't. Because Juniper is selling M40 routers at UUnet's and all of the NEXT-GENERATION networks, Juniper stands a good shot of selling more appropriate versions of the M40 to all the 6,000+ service providers (ISP's etc...) in the world. Cisco will obviously win a lot of business but Juniper will as well. There is room here for more than just Cisco and Lucent. Internet infrastructure is huge. Cisco will do very well, Lucent will do very well and Juniper will do very well. Juniper has a lead and an architecture advantage (why do you think so many smart people left Cisco to start Juniper?). Juniper is being installed at the core of the next-generation internet. Juniper has to integrate with Cisco's boxes but Cisco now has to make sure it can keep up with Junipers product development. Cisco is playing with an operating system originally designed for LAN's. JUNOS was optimized for the demands of next-generation networks. Juniper stands a good chance of a $20 billion+ market cap. The question is when is it going to get discounted and does it go to $5 billion first and do they not continue to innovate, in which case it will pull a CIEN. good luck to all, we can be sure it will be a volatile ride.