’Net Gains
Under CEO Kevin Johnson, Juniper Networks has an innovation strategy to revolutionize the experience and economics of networking in the decade ahead.
Jonathan Sprague
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E-mailTwo decades ago, the Internet was a new communication tool with endless potential, but existing technology limited its application and adoption. Traditional phone lines that weren’t designed to handle the data and off-the-shelf computers with unstable software simply couldn’t support the increase in traffic. Leading analysts predicted the system’s imminent collapse.
That’s when Pradeep Sindhu left his position as Distinguished Engineer at Xerox Corp.’s (XRX) Computer Science Lab in Palo Alto to spend six months thinking about a solution. His conclusion: The problem was the routers. Given their design at the time, he reasoned that routers would not be able to meet demand because the performance increases demanded by the network outstripped the performance increases provided by routers. He determined that a new hardware architecture was needed for routers — one that was based on separating the data path and the control path in a router and implementing the data path directly in silicon.
Sindhu says he launched Juniper Networks Inc. (JNPR) in 1996 to do just that. In the process, he revolutionized digital networking. “What we did was implement the entire forwarding path for the IP protocols directly in silicon and implement the control parts of a router on a general-purpose computer,” Sindhu explains. “Nobody had done that before.” By doing so, Juniper was able to focus on specializing the hardware for performance and scale, and apply the power of silicon directly to build the packet-forwarding heart of the machine. With high performance taken care of by the hardware, the software could now be more modular, cleaner, simpler and more open. That first router, run on Juniper’s Junos software, was 25 times as fast as the fastest on the market at that time, Sindhu says.
Today, Juniper reports that it generates $3.6 billion in annual revenues (2008) and has 7,000 employees worldwide. Its products are used by every one of the top 200 service providers globally, says Sindhu, now Juniper’s chief technical officer and vice chairman of the board. He stepped down as Juniper’s chairman and CEO in 1996, he says, to focus on research. “We saw this really difficult problem, saw a large market that was underserved, and we fundamentally changed the way in which routers were built to deliver a network that would be much more reliable,” Sindhu says.
Past as Prologue
The Internet is at a crossroads again today. The explosion of mobile devices, high-bandwidth downloads and global demand for an always-on, high-speed connection has pushed the existing system to its limit, Sindhu says. He adds that without radical innovation, the network is likely to break — either because the costs of maintaining the infrastructure are impossibly high or because the complex, proprietary systems are unable to meet the demand.
Under the direction of CEO Kevin Johnson, the company has made several strategic moves in the past year to ensure that it not only capitalizes on the next generation of data networking, often referred to as “cloud computing,” but also plays a leading role in its development that benefits business and society. “If the past 10 years were the decade of the high-performance network, the next 10 years will be the decade of the digitally connected culture,” Johnson says.
Johnson, 49, came to Juniper in September 2008 from Microsoft Corp., where he had served as president of the platforms and services division. Prior to that he worked in systems integration and consulting at International Business Machines Corp. (IBM). The Washington State native and New Mexico State University graduate says his job as CEO is to provide strategy and structure for Juniper’s vision of the future. “It’s important for a technology company to have a thought leadership agenda,” he says. “We need to look forward to see how the industry will be unfolding over the next decade — where the disruptions might occur, what the opportunities might be and what their implications will be for our customers.”
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Internally, the company says, it has ramped up its R&D, investing more than $700 million in the past year in new product development and system upgrades. Externally, it says, it announced strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as Nokia Siemens Networks — a joint venture between Nokia Corp. (NOK) and Siemens AG (SI) — and IBM to accelerate development and deployment of its routers into what Johnson calls “mega data centers.” And in November the company transferred its listing to the NYSE from Nasdaq, introducing a new logo and a new branding campaign at the same time.
