Juniper’s growing pains

Ten-year-old Juniper is going through growing pains. Juniper posted first-quarter sales shy of analyst forecasts, and at the low end of company guidance. For the period ended March 31, Juniper recorded net revenue of $566.7 million, about $5 million short of consensus estimates. Pro-forma earnings came in at $113.4 million, or 19 cents per share, in line with analyst estimates. Last quarter, Juniper said it expected first-quarter revenue to fall between $565 million and $575 million. For the second quarter, Juniper guided to revenue in the $560 million to $570 million range, well below analyst expectations of $587 million.

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Widevine Technologies, a provider of downloadable content protection and digital forensics, has attracted investments from Cisco and TELUS. Widevine’s products enable the acquisition of broadcast and video-on-demand content from studios and broadcasters. Cisco and TELUS participated in a $16 million Series C round of funding that included follw-on investments from VantagePoint, Bear Stearns Constellation Ventures, Pacesetter Capital and Phoenix Partners. Cisco did not disclose the amount of its investment in Widevine, but video is key for the company. Cisco recently bought set-top box supplier Scientific-Atlanta for $6.9 billion in an effort to gain a firm beachhead in the consumer entertainment market.

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Oracle plans to ship a telecom service delivery platform (SDP). As IDG News Service reports, Oracle is designing the SDP for use by carriers, network operators and systems integrators to help them move to service-oriented architectures. The aim is to provide a single programming environment based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition to make it easier for developers to deploy new services quickly, and integrate and manage those offerings with existing services. Oracle plans to enable users to access newer mobile voice services and enterprise applications through traditional communication networks, and networks based on IMS and VoIP.