Juniper woos corporate customers

Business customers, get ready for Juniper 2.0 -- more integrated network features and new support packages.

The company is making a big push to redefine itself as the provider of comprehensive, integrated enterprise infrastructure as opposed to a purveyor of disparate, independent enterprise gear.

The key to this reinvention is its EX switching line, a long-awaited addition that was announced earlier this year, backed up by automated support services to avoid problems when possible and resolve them quicker when they occur (Read about Juniper's automated support services, and compare access switches.)

“We couldn’t go into an enterprise and talk about a solution because we only had point products,” but that has changed with the addition of the switches, says Mark Bauhaus, Juniper’s executive vice president and general manager of its service-layer technologies business group since last fall. That division handles Juniper’s security, application acceleration, unified access control, and enterprise routing lines.

Click to see: A chart of Juniper's revenue

Bauhaus is making a tour of press and analysts to underscore this shift in emphasis from individual products to “solutions” as a way to attract more enterprise business. He offers three examples that include ways EX switches can bring cooperation to previously independent Juniper gear in ways that reduce data-center hardware and latency, block threats automatically and extend Juniper NAC technology beyond security to deliver capabilities such as identity-based quality of service.

Juniper has a legitimate case to make defining its broad capabilities for corporate networks, says Phil Hochmuth, an analyst with the Yankee Group. “It’s a good starting point to get enterprises interested,” he says. “It gives an idea of what Juniper is cooking up and where they may be able to go. It’s certainly more interesting than saying this T-Series router is really fast or this NetScreen firewall has really high throughput.”

Bauhaus also is trying to address possible customer concerns about Juniper’s financial viability by pointing out its improving operating margins, portraying the $2.8 billion company as a lean, scrappy newcomer that wants to double its size.

“We see ourselves as an underdog with something to prove,” he says, and characterizes the company as smaller and younger than the rival it most wants to succeed against for enterprise business, namely Cisco.

Customer concerns about Juniper’s longevity are preyed upon by Cisco, Hochmuth says. “That’s something they put in customers’ ears sometimes to sway decisions,” he says. “Nobody doubts the long-term viability of Cisco.”

Emphasis on the company’s efficiency and staying power may be the result of criticism from Wall Street firms about the company and demands they put on it to perform better. Despite consistent growth in revenues and profits, the company has pretty much tapped out the strategy it employed to achieve that growth, and it needs to rely now on expanding its enterprise business, say Ryan Hutchinson and Edward Parker in a report for Lazard Capital Markets.