Juniper Networks Takes Different View

Other analysts are seeing a promising future for the router space. In February, Dell'Oro Group said Cisco and its closest rival, Juniper Networks, were key drivers in the 15 percent revenue jump in routers for service providers in the fourth quarter of 2009, and said it expects the trend to continue in 2010. Cisco saw an 11 percent increase in revenue during the quarter, Juniper 17 percent.

"With the worst of the economic downturn behind us, we expect that service providers will start more network projects resulting in meaningful market growth this year," Dell'Oro analyst Shin Umeda said at the time.

Juniper also is aggressively expanding the capabilities of its products to meet the growing bandwidth demand. At the Mobile World Congress event in February, Juniper unveiled a host of new offerings addressing mobile device traffic across networks and that will rely on Juniper products such as its MX 3D Series routers, SRX Series Services Gateways and Junos network operating system.

At the time, Juniper officials said mobile operators were looking for vendors to move away from offering boxes-an obvious dig at Cisco-and toward more open platforms with greater innovation. During an interview the day after Cisco's CRS-3 announcement, Mike Marcellin, Juniper's vice president of marketing in its Infrastructure Business Group and Junos Ready Software, reiterated that statement.

Marcellin agreed with Cisco officials that IP traffic is growing rapidly.

"The network is feeling the strain of that growth," he said. "The growth of traffic is truly exponential."

Marcellin said there are key differences in the approaches Cisco and Juniper are taking in dealing with that growth. He said Juniper has been selling systems with 100GB capabilities for several years, and pointed to the unveiling in October 2009 of the company's Junos Trio chipset, which allows for 2.6T-bps throughput. The silicon also supports more subscribers, services and bandwidth than previous chipset technology did.

Juniper also takes advantage of the Junos operating system and an open platform that enables third parties to develop applications that are optimized for Juniper's products. Service providers are looking for innovation, not simply another box, he said.