Juniper Extends Routers Toward Enterprise

Juniper Networks on Monday introduced a line of routers designed to bring the company's high-end routing functionality closer to the enterprise customer, a move that also brings Juniper into more direct competition with routing giant Cisco Systems.

Even though Juniper took steps Monday to try and minimize the potential competition with Cisco, the introduction of lower-end systems puts Juniper more deeply into the realm of enterprise routing, where Cisco holds a huge market-share lead. The J-Series routers (code-named "Pepsi"), which Juniper said will be generally available in September, will also be made available for reselling in part by service providers, who might sell them as part of their service contracts with enterprise customers.

In a conference call Monday afternoon, Jim Dolce, executive vice president for Juniper's worldwide field operations, said the new router line was designed to help service providers deliver better quality of service to their enterprise customers. Juniper's high-end routers, typically sold to large telecom service providers, run the company's JUNOS operating system, which provides support for fault tolerance, quality of service metrics and convergence of different services.

"This [announcement] extends JUNOS in a platform optimized for the customer edge," said Dolce.

The J-Series will be available in three sizes: The J2300, a fixed platform with one primary and one expansion slot that supports WAN uplinks of up to 8 Mbps; the J4300, a modular platform with 16 Mbps uplink capacity, and six open slots; and the J6300, with a 90 Mbps uplink capacity, six open slots and the option of a redundant power supply. Pricing for base models ranges from $2,000 for the J2300 to $9,000 for the J6300, Juniper said. WAN cards for the J-Series line include serial, Fast Ethernet, T-1 and T-3 versions; pricing for the cards was not available.In a somewhat bumbled attempt to fend off questions of Juniper's intentions to compete more in the enterprise market, Dolce several times tried to paint the announcement only as an attempt by Juniper to provide a better way to bring advanced services to the enterprise, an explanation that did more to confuse than clarify.

"You should not infer [the announcement] as an interest or some drive to extend beyond that point," said Dolce, in response to the inevitable question about Juniper's enterprise intentions.

On the other hand, Dolce did not rule out any further forays deeper into the enterprise, and in fact Juniper also announced the availability of a new version of the NetScreen 5 series security appliance, which adds an integrated DSL modem to a box that provides firewall, IP Sec VPN and antivirus protection functionality.