Juniper Networks, Inc. is a highly renowned supplier of high-performance networking devices for the fiber-optic infrastructure. The company is highly acclaimed and reliable and has been rated one of the world’s fastest-growing companies in this domain. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States, this American International Corporation was founded by Pradeep Sindhu in 1996.

Juniper Networks develops and markets a large variety of networking products, such as:

  • Network switches
  • Routers
  • Network management software
  • Network security products
  • Software-defined networking (SDN) technology

Originally, Juniper focuses on developing core routers that function to carry out IP address lookups and direct internet traffic. The company is successfully developing and marketing high-end equipment to route traffic across the largest internet backbones, i.e. mega phone companies and internet service providers. Since its acquisition of Unisphere in 2002, Juniper is also offering edge routers mainly used by ISPs to route internet traffic to consumers.

A year later, Juniper also entered the IT security market with its own security toolkit. Besides, it also makes network traffic management software called JUNOS. For using its products correctly and efficiently, Juniper Networks also offers training, support, and implementation services. Juniper sells its products directly or indirectly through manufacturers to internet and telecommunication service providers.

Within a short period of 5 years, Juniper captured one third of the router market which products that are mainly geared towards telecommunication providers, which spend billions of dollars on capital equipment. In the market where Cisco Systems sidelines most challengers and competitors, Juniper has become a renowned brand and sustained a huge growth. Though the company established itself as a niche player, Juniper has now expanded its markets from ISPs and telecommunication service providers to the network’s edge and emerging mobile IP market.

How was Juniper Networks formed?

As mentioned above, Juniper Networks was founded by the computer scientist Pradeep Sindhu. He was once a principal scientist of Xerox’s renowned Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1995, he left to go on a vacation and came back with the concept of forming a new company that would design and develop reliable, high-performance routers to support the quickly surging demand for bandwidth and Internet. He already knew that information would soon overtake voice traffic on telephone networks and hence, the networks will need high-performance routers to keep the pace with skyrocketing demand for bandwidth.

By breaking up data and eliminating the need for dedicated circuits, routers were developed that allowed higher traffic and reduced costs than switches used by traditional phone networks. The founder dreamed to become a niche player in the $10 billion router market that was already dominated by Cisco Systems, which also developed routers for telecommunication companies and internet service providers based on the same technology it has traditionally used for corporate firms.

The name of the company “Juniper” was chosen that symbolizes the root system of the Juniper tree - which is quite complex and amazingly strong.

Juniper came with the promise to defeat the bottleneck problems on the Internet by offering routers that would move data up to 100 times faster than the routers sold by its competitors. With his strong ideology and solid idea and plan, Pradeep Sindhu started the company in February 1996 with $200,000 in seed money that it got from a powerful venture-capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, and Caufield & Byers.

The management team of Juniper included former employees from renowned companies such as Bay Networks, Cisco Systems, Silicon Graphics, and 3com.

Sindhu had the idea of starting with new hardware from the ground up to connect billions of potential Internet users. Unlike other network equipment makers, he came up with the idea of outsourcing all of its manufacturing operations so that they can better use assets, reduce production costs, and speed up the time to market for the fast-evolving Internet.

The company harnessed the power of the Internet to streamline its operations. Right from its inception, Juniper worked and collaborated on designs and linked with outsourcers and managed its inventory via Web. In July 1996, it developed a technology relationship with IBM to produce all the application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for its internet platforms.

In the end of 1997, Juniper launched JUNOS which became the industry’s first operating system developed specifically for routing and operational needs of the rapidly growing Internet backbone networks. After intensive testing of JUNOS, it shipped its most-anticipated first product the M40 router that fulfilled its promise to deliver faster and more reliable Internet access and packet delivery. This product was capable of forwarding 40 million packets per second. The company gave assurance that this terabit router would deliver traffic up to 10 times quicker than other existing products in the market.

As a result, Juniper gained recognition across the industry for delivering the best new product and also won PC Magazine UK’s 1999 Technology Innovation award. Slowly, Juniper started to chip away at Cisco’s share in the market.

Even though Cisco is making huge strides and still has the largest share in the domain, Juniper routers are still considered the best in the market and various mega companies and large organizations prefer products made by Juniper.

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