Cloud, mobility will drive revenue, Juniper says

04.03.2011
Juniper Networks reaffirmed its long-term forecast for annual revenue growth of 20 percent or more as it met with financial analysts on Thursday following two big product-line introductions.

The company remains focused solely on networking and believes it can keep taking market share from competitors by seizing on architectural transitions driven by the explosive growth in data traffic in enterprise and carrier networks, CEO Kevin Johnson said at the annual Juniper Financial Analyst Meeting in San Francisco.

Juniper kicked off the conference by , a service-provider core platform that will combine packet switching and optical network components. This followed , a new architecture designed to reduce data-center networks to a single logical switch. Simplifying networks is at the core of the company's overall strategy, aimed at both scaling up networks and cutting costs.

Cloud computing and mobility are the main drivers of the new demand for networking, Johnson said. As carriers and companies try to scale up their networks, they will need simpler architectures, because the current model involves deploying a multiplicity of devices, he said. He compared it to a model of computing in which every type of application needs its own special server hardware.

"The legacy approach in networking is not sustainable," Johnson said. "The industry is just being crushed by the complexity of this legacy model."

One service provider that subscribes to this view is Japanese carrier NTT Communications, which in the past two years has seen the traffic on its trans-Pacific Internet backbone grow from 180G bps (gigabits per second) to 450G bps. It expects to see that grow to 600G bps by the end of this year, said Kempei Fukuda, senior director of NTT's global network, who spoke on a panel at the Juniper conference. As the traffic load grows, competition is also forcing NTT to sell bandwidth at lower rates, Fukuda said. NTT plans to move all its core network traffic from standard Internet routers to the type of converged architecture in the PTX platform over the next few years, he said.