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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul_philp who wrote (48018)	10/17/2001 3:55:58 AM
From: techreports	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

The command line interface (CLI) is probably less than 1% of what IOS does. The meat of IOS are the routing algorithms. Even though IP and the routing protocols (OSPF, BGP) are standards, their implementations are very different. One of the reasons Juniper has been successful is that they made Junos 'bug-compatible' with the routing protocol implementation in IOS. How easy is this to do? Juniper had to hire Tony Li and his team away from Cisco to get the job done. Other routing products that are not compatible 100% with IOS do not stand much of a chance in the market. Is it not likely that another router company will get their routers to work with JUNOS and IOS? Plus, isn't that illegal to hire Cisco employees and then ask them to build a product using technologies they developed at Cisco? As for lock-in, the proper term is switching costs. The cost of switching from IOS is very high. All your tech folks are trained in IOS and all you routing tables are built in IOS. There is very little question about Cisco's status as a Gorilla. I think the problem is that some people (including me) don't exactly know the difference between Cisco and Juniper. Juniper's routers were created for the core market, while Cisco had been focused on the enterprise which is like routers for corporations not telecom carriers, correct? When we get those reports on how much market share each company has, does that include all routers or just routers for the core? The metro? Where's Juniper's gorilla power coming from? Yes, there is a chance no other company will produce a router that works with JUNOS and IOS, but that doens't make JNPR a gorilla. I know Juniper has launch a program where companies can integrate their products with Juniper's or something, but I'm sure Cisco is doing the same. Say I start techreports OS company. I hire a few Microsoft programers and then create a OS that runs every Windows application. Am I now a gorilla? What happens if Microsoft changes APIs? What happens if Cisco changes or updates the IOS? Would creating a router that works with IOS be easier or harder than creating an OS that runs windows applications. The weird thing is, the technology is out there to create a OS that runs Windows applications, but it doesn't seem like linux or Apple is really focusing on this..? I really don't think Microsoft's hold on the OS market is THAT strong. I mean, I could see Windows w/ say 80% share if someone offered a OS that was decent and ran on x86 processors.

To: paul_philp who wrote (48018)	10/17/2001 5:47:09 PM
From: Atin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I guess I wasn't talking of the enterprise market when I was questioning the power of IOS - I was talking about the service provider market (the market JNPR plays in and many new router companies play in). The service provider market seems not to be tied to IOS. Witness the strength of Juniper when Cisco didn't have the speeds and feeds to match - so it seems that switching costs from IOS were not prohibitive. Maybe there are two games going on in the router market - enterprise and service provider. One game is done - the other isn't, or so it would seem. And Cisco is trying to leverage the software from one market into the other and I am not sure whether this is an advantage when trying to match speeds and feeds with smaller players like JNPR that don't have to worry about legacy protocols etc that no one in the service provider market uses. -Atin