Juniper Networks is one of the few vendors that has figured out how to stand up to Cisco. In core Internet routing, Juniper holds about a 40% market share to Cisco's 55%. Last year, the company took aim at Cisco in enterprise routing, introducing its J-Series WAN routers. Last month, Juniper acquired two traffic-acceleration start-ups, fueling speculation that it might be hungry for even more enterprise network technologies. CEO Scott Kriens recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth about Juniper's enterprise network strategy. Here's an edited transcript:

You've successfully challenged Cisco in Internet routing; what's your plan for gaining share in enterprise routing, where Cisco is more dominant?

The strategy is to focus, execute and build trusted relationships with customers for whom the network is critical. It's exactly the same way we grew to a 40% market share in the service provider business from zero. It looked a lot more daunting as a company of size zero to grow to 40% in mission-critical backbone networking. We don't take any success for granted. It's going to be hard work. But we have a formula and model that we're very comfortable with.

What is it about a Juniper enterprise router that would make a Cisco customer want to switch?

Before devolving into all the acronyms and gobbledygook, it's this: deep inspection of traffic at high speeds. The compromise in any implementation that we compete against, whether it's firewalls or routers or anything else, is other products can look deeply and carefully at the traffic flow, as long as it's going slow enough. Or they whip it through fast enough to meet the requirement, as long as they don't look very close. But of course the problem is you have to look very deep - closer than ever - inside packets. And as we start to do things such as run video and live TV on cell phones, you have to do it faster than ever.

Regarding your recent acquisitions of Peribit and RedLine, how will their technologies be integrated into Juniper's products? What's the value of these technologies?

This area of application performance is the best-kept secret in networking. [Their products] offer a dramatic improvement in Web site performance and remote access.