"The incumbent has already placed or made statements about what it intends to do with ... SDN and the fact that it has the intention to control the standard," Sindhu said, referring to Cisco. "Juniper has no intent to control the standard. What we want to do is we want to see open standards develop. We don't want to do standards plus. We want to have open standard, and we want to exploit the fact that we have a single operating system which will make it a lot easier for us to do things."

Juniper's claims its SDN strategy is consistent with the direction it's pursued since 2009.

Three years ago, Juniper announced its built around three goals: innovation, automation and optimization to reduce cost.

"You roll forward to 2012 and you ask the question about what are the goals of SDN? It turns out that the goals are exactly the same, completely identical," Sindhu said.

"We see SDN as a very, very strong opportunity. It's not a threat."