Cisco and Juniper in war of words and routers

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Cisco and Juniper in war of words and routers

Smaller vendor "ups the ante" in edge routers, while Cisco unleashes three new ASR models and a verbal onslaught

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 13 September, 2011

Both Cisco and Juniper have launched new routers this week, but the headlines have been grabbed by the war of words between the rivals rather the hardware. Cisco has abandoned its usual lofty stance of barely acknowledging its smaller competitor's existence and unleashed an aggressive attack on a special web site entitled overpromisesunderdelivers.net.

The theme of the site is self-explanatory, and has been backed up by comments from senior executives such as EVP of worldwide operations Rob Lloyd, who told The Wall Street Journal that Juniper was "leaving customers and partners disappointed", especially in the critical battleground of edge routers - a market where Juniper unveiled powerful new products this week. The web site features various digital counters listing years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds allegedly elapsing between Juniper edge router launches and shipments.

The uncharacteristically aggressive name-calling by Cisco could point to panic, with Juniper launching a series of ground-breaking technologies in the core and edge router markets over the past year, including a switch-based approach which dilutes the role of the classic Cisco-style router altogether. Or it could be the prelude to a stepped-up assault on Juniper (and enterprise router rival HP/3Com), or even an acquisition bid, as Cisco aims to instil confidence in its recent restructuring and its own plan to emerge from recent troubles. Blogging on the SeekingAlpha investment site, Dana Blankenhorn commented: "Now may be the start of a new Cisco bull run and buying out one of its major competitors could easily accelerate it. Thus the playground tactics. If you hit her hard enough, she might say yes."

In the very sector at the heart of the row, Juniper announced that it had "upped the ante again" by expanding the capacity of its MX 3D universal edge routers to 3.8Tbps. It claimed this is the industry's highest edge routing capacity, targeting mobile, cloud computing and enterprise networks, and the upgrade applies to all MX Series services, including Juniper's MobileNext open mobile core for LTE. The new performance is enabled by an in-service switch fabric upgrade to existing MX Series chassis.

Juniper says the updated MX Series also improves network economics by reducing the total number of elements while working at less than four watts per gigabit of processed traffic. Juniper said in its statement: "The MX Series supports up to three times the subscriber capacity and double the platform and rack capacity of competitive platforms at less than one-third the total power consumption. A single MX960 can support 8m mobile subscribers or 10,000 business VPNs."

The most urgent task of such products is perhaps not to close the gap with Cisco, as much as to fend off the growing strength of Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei in this space. According to Infonetics Research, in the second quarter Cisco's lead in edge routers was 32%, followed by Juniper and ALU head-to-head on 17%, and Huawei with 13% and growing. As for Cisco's actions, Juniper's VP of global corporate communications, David Shane, told CRN: "We're not going to comment on a competitor's publicity stunt." He then went on to comment, saying: "Customers tell us they want an alternative to the legacy approach and we're focusing on delivering innovation for them. It appears as if Cisco has once again lost focus."

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