NEW YORK - Businesses need to embrace service-oriented architectures, outsourced services and flexible-network infrastructure to respond effectively to uncertain commercial forces, said Juniper Chairman and CEO Scott Kriens, who delivered a keynote address at Interop Tuesday.

"They need to create [an] environment that can respond to changing risks," he told a moderately sized audience before the show floor opened.

Investing in long-term service contracts and network gear that allows for growth as needed without massive investment up front makes businesses nimble enough for when demand increases or declines, he said.

If network resources are shared - both between corporations and within organizations - the fixed cost of ownership drops, making it less expensive to operate in lean times, he said. Corporations can spend more in better times as demand grows for capacity, he says. "You can turn it up and turn it down," Kriens said.

He called this flexible network the on-time, real-time enterprise and says it is needed to support SOA effectively to meet business objectives. That requires a marriage of infrastructure, applications and security.

"We need to create opportunity or solve problems with IT investment," Kriens said. "We need to adopt technology to develop business advantages. . . . IT should be considered a competitive advantage, not a cost center."

In corporate networking, businesses need to tie applications in with security infrastructure design so any application can be protected without special provisioning for any particular one. And that infrastructure should be simple, predictable, standardized and customer oriented, so it performs its technical tasks and helps businesses reach business goals, he said.

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