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Captain Kriens Steps Aside As Captain of the Starship Juniper

It's been widely rumored for the past couple of years that Juniper had been seeking a replacement for Kriens to transition Juniper from a best-of-breed box vendor to more of a platform vendor, allowing them to compete better with the likes of Cisco.

Even though the past couple of years have been somewhat disappointing for Juniper and filled with failed acquisitions, the majority of the Kriens era should be looked on as a success. Juniper hit the industry with a bang. They built a better mousetrap, or in this case a telco edge router and caught the transition to IP networks at the perfect time. In fact, if there were an award given for the "start up of the 90s", Juniper would be one of the finalists. Juniper then acquired Unisphere and became one of the dominant telecom vendors. However, since then, other than the acquisition of Netscreen, which one could argue would be just as big without being acquired; Juniper grew primarily on the back of their router business. Acquisitions such as Kagoor, Redline and Peribit never really lived up to their promise and Juniper was never really able to put that "end to end" story together. Additionally, outside of security, Juniper has never been able to really crack the enterprise code. Much of the problem for Juniper has been the company's inability to tell a story that's broader than just technical speeds and feeds. Cisco tells a story of how it "empowers the human network", Juniper markets the technical merits of Junos, its operating system.

So, what now for Juniper? I believe that significant share shift only occurs at the time of market transitions. As I stated earlier, Juniper caught the transition to IP with the right product at the right time. I do believe that there is another transition occurring that Juniper can leverage to get to the next level, and that's the network becoming a platform for applications and communications. The theory being that the network touches everything and can actually influence the way applications perform and the way applications are built. All traffic passes through network devices and application developers and network service providers can embed network functions or use network statistics to alter how applications perform, change policies or automate certain processes. The benefit of being a platform is that the ecosystem that's around the platform drives the value and creates a tremendous amount of pull through. For example, no one buys Windows for its technical superiority over other operating systems. Companies buy Windows because of all the stuff that runs on top of Windows. Microsoft creates the operating system, ISVs create the value and the entire ecosystem wins.

The openness and modularity of Juniper's operating system give it a distinct advantage over Cisco, if Juniper can convince the industry that the operating system matters. Additionally, Juniper has one common operating system across its network products (but not all its products), giving it yet another leverage point over Cisco, who has many different versions of operating systems. Cisco has been pushing the concept of "network as a platform" as well, but is just at the beginning of this journey themselves, so while Juniper is behind, there is still an opportunity to catch this market transition and leverage it into share gain.

For Juniper to catch this transition it needs to walk the platform walk and find a way to develop an ecosystem around it that can leverage the Juniper platform. This is where Kevin Johnson from Microsoft comes in. Kevin Johnson was president of Microsoft's Platform and Services division and also ran strategy for Windows for a period of time. Johnson will bring an IT and software mentality to Juniper rather than a traditional telecom and networking mentality and move the company in a direction to take advantage of the transition to network as a platform.

I believe Scott Kriens was the right CEO for Juniper during his tenure but the company clearly needs new leadership to rapidly grow Juniper beyond the $3 billion mark. Time will tell if history will repeat for Johnson, who joined Microsoft when it was actually smaller than where Juniper currently is. But on paper, he appears to be the right person for this phase of Juniper's growth.