Switching makes up the least amount of Juniper's product revenue, at 12%. Routers, and services are all greater contributors. Also, Juniper's share of the $6.57 billion Layer 2/3 data center switch market in 2011 was 3.1%, placing it fifth behind , HP, Dell and IBM, according to Dell'Oro Group. Juniper may have a tough time building on that this year as 2012 is expected to still see mostly trials for its QFabric switches, a platform that .

WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS?

While the rest of the industry was fixated last week on to the SDN craze, Juniper quietly unveiled its own SDN strategy at its financial analyst meeting and at a trade show in Japan. A transcript from the financial analyst meeting can be found on the .

Similar to Cisco's strategy, Juniper's keys in on a between the network devices and the orchestration layer in an SDN, and marginalizes the use of the OpenFlow protocol but not its role; a couple of key differences, though, is that Juniper is focusing its initial SDN efforts on data center only versus Cisco's five target markets, and plans on injecting programmability into one operating system versus three for Cisco. [Also see: ""]

"If I am running on every one of these nodes a different operating system, it actually makes it quite hard to write a controller that controls all these things," Juniper CTO Pradeep Sindhu said. "So we believe that the fact that all of our equipment runs Junos actually makes it much, much easier for us to do it compared to our competition."