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

To: FR1 who wrote (3135)	3/21/2002 12:30:05 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3350

FR1, First, I don't have the information at my fingertips that shows where, in what solution spaces, Cisco has eaten into their space, since I don't usually follow market share numbers very closely in this sector. I'd have to do some research. What I can tell you is what networkers on the more traveled ISP and backbone provider mailing lists are saying about the homogeneity of JUNOS versus the myriad of releases now prevalent throughout the IOS world, and many of them just love it. But those are the engineers, the guys who have to run the networks. Which is to say, they are not the top suits of these outfits who control the purse strings. When I view this new contest between Cisco and Juniper I find it reminiscent of how Nortel's Evergreen Policy (don't throw any code away, just keep building on it) eventually caught up to them, making Cisco's fresh approach look attractive about eight years ago, and since, when compared to the mix of products that Bay/Nortel had pieced together (confusing) in order to compete. But since then, Cisco has done with its mix of product/company acquisitions what Bay/Synoptics/Nortel had done before, probably more so by now. Imo, they've created a highly complex architectural model, keeping in mind that all of the acquired parts must now support all of the same features and capabilities. The end result is a wide variety of disparate elements running under different revs of the ios code - and these are the building blocks that comprise what the company boasts as their "single vendor solution." But they manage to orchestrate these elements well enough for customers to keep coming back for more, despite some SP and Enterprise engineers going bald, prematurely. [[Of course, there were other factors why Cisco took share away from Bay/Nortel in the emerging Internet of the time, e.g., IP vs. switched, early identification and resulting mind share that Cisco enjoyed in connection with the 'Net, etc., not to mention their dominant role in the IETF and other standards bodies, writing many of the RFCs and the resultig standards that the 'Net now functions under.]] And this aspect of clarity of OS code stands out loud and clear today, once again, as one of the most compelling reasons for some network engineers to prefer a "new" fresh look. Is Juniper it? It seemed so for a while, maybe they still are. Don't know. Perhaps if you can point me to the studies that show Cisco pulling away with the gold I could formulate a more informed reply to your question. FAC