Juniper is often not one to discuss with the media its thoughts on the competition when the competition - i.e. Cisco - makes a big product announcement. However, this week, Juniper CTO and founder Pradeep Sindhu told Network World's Jim Duffy exactly what he thought of Cisco's new ASR 1000 router, namely how wrong Cisco is to force its customers to learn a new operating system with each new product (ASR 1000 sports the new IOS-XE, and the Cisco Nexus data center switch has the new NX-OS).

In a Q&A with Duffy, Sindhu said: "[A single operating system] is a need that our customers are telling us they have. They do not like the fact that they have to read manuals this thick to figure out what release of the operating system works with which particular product and products, and what the combination of limitations are that are imposed by particular subsets of the products that they are using. That becomes very complicated. Much of this is reflected in operational cost increasing for the customer."

He said this is in sharp contrast to Juniper's strategy of having a single OS and a single architecture. "We try to have a consistent single operating system and a single unified architecture for two reasons: internally [at Juniper], it is tremendously efficient because we get to solve difficult problems once rather than solving them over and over again; from a customer’s standpoint products appear to be consistent and are consistent, so they are a lot easier to use."

Makes sense to me. But why is it that Cisco is coming out with a new OS with each new significant product?

See also: Cisco launches ASR 1000 router: What's Juniper's next move?

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