The wordsmith

In any earnings season, only one company’s quarterly conference call causes me actual physical pain: that of Juniper Networks. I try to transcribe all the calls in a rough shorthand as I listen, and Juniper’s chief executive officer, Scott Kriens, has a verbal style that can induce carpal tunnel syndrome. The man has the gift of gab, no doubt. He doesn’t seem to need oxygen while he speaks, and he composes each sentence like it’s a Jackson Pollock painting. With phrases like “if and as we grow revenue…,” he reminds me of what Martin Sheen’s character once said on the West Wing: “In my house, anyone who uses one word when they could have used ten just isn’t trying hard.”

Maybe analysts love Kriens’ precision. And maybe someone as wordy and overly talkative as me should shut up about it. But I also wonder whether such garrulous speech creates clouds of confusion to hide behind. So in order to determine if I’m the only who feels this way, I’m initiating the Scott Kriens Challenge. Here’s how it works. You read a response given by Kriens and translate it using as few words as possible to communicate the same thing. I’ll post the winning entries in a future column. Here’s today’s challenge:

On Monday’s call, one analyst asked when Juniper’s Service Layer Technologies business would start contributing to the company’s overall earnings, adding, “It’s been three years in the running, and this business is still losing money.”

Kriens responded first by clarifying the difference between the margins of Juniper’s SLT business and its enterprise business. But then he said this:

“Your point is a good one. Yes, there is a gap in the contribution from the enterprise business relative to that of the service provider business. We, as we look across 2007, we see the opportunity for the growth of the enterprise business--and I’ll again draw that distinction--but also, within that, the growth of service layer technologies as both being sufficient to generate a positive contribution to the bottom line and to be a positive contributor to operating results. In terms of the metrics or exactly how we get there, it’ll depend a little bit on--I tell ya, it will depend on two things: One is absolute growth rate. Obviously the more of that we see--and this is true, the operating margin comment I make is true across the entire business--we have a pretty good idea of what we’ll spend. And if we see revenue acceleration, then--and this is a business-wide comment, but it’s also particular to enterprise and particular to SLT--growth in those areas beyond our current expectations would produce a more rapid improvement in the contribution margins that are made both collectively and individually within these areas. So that’s one contributor or one place to look. Secondly, as we start to see this business--as it is doing--as we see it start to scale, we believe there’s opportunity even at the growth rates that we currently project, to improve the operating margin contributions as a byproduct of the scale of the business. So if it’s pure growth on the top line that exceeds our expectations, it would happen faster. But even at current course and speed, the scale of the business and the ability to spread some of the costs of marketing and the costs of the development of the channel will allow a contribution to occur even if we don’t see growth beyond our expectations. And I’d expect a chance for that to occur--for both of those to occur--certainly over the next few quarters, and it’s something that we expect to report positively on in 2007.”

Okay, go to it. How could he have said the same thing using as few words as possible?

E-mail me at ed.gubbins@penton.com. And good luck!