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One year has passed since Juniper closed the books on its acquisition of VPN and intrusion-prevention vendor NetScreen Technologies , but the company has yet to parlay its year-old enterprise security presence into a broader corporate business.

Juniper's game plan calls for users of NetScreen's popular SSL and IPSec VPN and intrusion-prevention products to consider Juniper elsewhere in the enterprise. Toward that end, Juniper last summer introduced its first business-class WAN routers, the J-Series. But as of early April, Juniper had no J-Series account references it could share publicly. The company says only that a major bank, which uses NetScreen security products, has bought the WAN gear.

At the deal's one-year anniversary, industry watchers debate whether Juniper's $4 billion gambit was a smart move.

From a financial perspective, Juniper's recent sales history has been disappointing, says Nikos Theodosopoulos, a senior financial analyst with UBS Warburg. In the last quarter of last year, revenue from the NetScreen part of the business amounted to $99 million, he says. That's up from $94 million posted by NetScreen alone the quarter before Juniper bought it. "The question is," he says, " 'When will it resume the 30% to 40% growth NetScreen was showing before?'" he says.

Overall, though, Theodosopoulos considers Juniper a strong company - and in good shape to acquire the technology it needs. That's just what Juniper intends to do to get VoIP technology. In late March, the company signed a definitive agreement to acquire session border controller vendor Kagoor Networks for $67.5 million, plus options and other incentives. With Kagoor's technology, Juniper will be able to provide VoIP and other media services to network operators.

Juniper has more than $1 billion in cash and short-term investments, and its stock trades at higher relative values to its sales than do other network vendors, Theodosopoulos says. Juniper's price-per-earnings ratio is 84.96, while Cisco's is 22.7, for example. Plus, with NetScreen under its wing, Juniper has moved up 15 notches on the Network World 200, to 55.