Kriens: Juniper Acquisitions Provide Web Piece Parts

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Juniper Network Inc.s acquisitions of two Web performance optimization technology companies this week provide some of the "piece parts" required to improve the quality, security and reliability of Web applications, Chairman Scott Kriens said Wednesday.

There is still a lot of development work to be done in terms of improving the design of networks and software to improve application performance and users experience on the Internet, Kriens said in his keynote address at the Software 2005 conference here.

This is necessary because users and organizations are still working with applications that were never originally designed to work with thousands of users spread over widely separated locations, he suggested.

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"Web-based applications only work if the Web and the application understand each other," Kriens said. Furthermore, "on-demand computing only works if we can get the demand to the computing in the first place," and there are still plenty of bottlenecks in network performance, he said.

Application developers are at a disadvantage because its difficult to disrupt business while they go back and rewrite applications to optimize applications for network performance, he said. The next problem is how do network and application designers develop new systems that are "much smarter about each other" so they dont continue to proliferate the existing problems? Kriens said.

The need to find a way around these problems is the reason Juniper spent nearly $500 million to acquire Peribit Networks Inc. and Redline Networks Inc., he said.

Click here to read the details of Junipers acquisitions of Peribit Networks and Redline Networks.

Each companys products take a different approach to the problem of application and network performance, he said. Redline markets front-end technology that fortifies the performance and scalability for data centers and Web sites. Peribit provides WAN performance optimization technology.

Application front ends take over a lot of the functionality and the burden of processing sessions and multiplexed TCP "in a way that allows for much more effective resource utilization, and it gets rid of a lot of the chattiness in these applications" Kriens said. "It doesnt scale to have dozens of sessions start and stop every time a user presses Enter," he said. WAN optimization improves the performance of business applications across the Web and across large corporate networks through the use of compression technology.

These technologies are "interesting piece parts" that really need to work together "because it is not sufficient to optimize a Web site with a data center" without optimizing the entire transaction from end to end, he said.

Next Page: Tuning performance.