Juniper's Kriens Stuck On Traffic

LAS VEGAS -- Interop -- Just days after coughing up $469 million for Redline Networks Inc. and Peribit Networks Inc., Juniper Networks Inc.s (Nasdaq: JNPR) CEO Scott Kriens shared some insight into his grand plans for the hardware vendor at a packed meeting of partners at Interop here.

Traffic processing is clearly the name of the game for Juniper. The company, he said, aims to handle application traffic from the moment a user presses "enter" on a device, through the data center and the application processor, and then out through the transmission line.

Kriens, who started his speech by telling attendees about his early career as a calculator salesman, did not give any indication of Juniper’s future M&A plans. But he said there are still “billions and billions of dollars” to be made in the traffic processing market.

”When it comes to the acquisitions we made last week, we bought a couple of companies and spent half a billion dollars exactly in the center of this space,” he said.

Kriens now plans to remedy the shortcomings within the current technology landscape. ”Applications were never meant to reach over distances and they were never built to run through Web interfaces to reach the browsers on the devices."For an application to be successful it needs to run over Web interfaces and run over distances around the world, Kriens added.

Gary Miliefsky, the CEO of Juniper partner PredatorWatch Inc., believes the acquisitions were a shrewd move by Juniper. “It’s going to step on the toes of folks like F5 Networks,” he said. Miliefsky added that the deals take Juniper’s traffic management up into the application layer.

Peribit offers technologies to boost application performance over a wide-area network (WAN), whereas Redline offers a range of devices for accelerating Websites and applications such as those from SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP), Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), and Siebel Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: SEBL). (See Peribit Intros App Acceleration and Redline Wins With PBS.)

Market forces probably played a major part in Juniper’s decision to snap up Peribit exactly when it did. Jef [sic] Graham, Peribit’s CEO, said the company was just a few months away from an IPO when Juniper stepped in. “We could have gone out in July if the market was hot,” he said. “It would have been possible, but we were gearing up to go out after Labor Day.”

Graham explained that Peribit had already selected its banks for the offering. If, however, this had taken place, then Juniper could have found itself paying a market premium for the company.”We first talked a year ago, but the decision to move forward was a month ago,” said Graham, who will now run Juniper’s new applications product group, overseeing both the Peribit and Redline product portfolios.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-Gen Data Center Forum