Alcatel puts Juniper on defense

Juniper Networks issued a press release today pointing out that the company maintained its position as the world’s No. 2 supplier of service provider edge routers in the third quarter.

As the news represents no change in pecking order from the last 12 quarters (and in fact, a slight loss of market share for Juniper during the quarter), the statement is likely a response to Alcatel’s trumpeting yesterday of a substantial increase in its share of the IP edge aggregation router market.

According to Synergy Research, sales of Alcatel’s 7750 and 7450 products gave the vendor nearly $89 million in revenue in the third quarter, a 152% sequential jump. As a result, Alcatel leapfrogged Juniper to become the world’s No. 2 supplier of IP edge aggregation equipment in the quarter, second only to Cisco Systems. Alcatel’s share of that market jumped from 9.2% to 23.6% in the quarter while Juniper’s share slid a point to 19.7%. (Cisco’s share dropped about 14 points to 46%.)

For the full year, however, Juniper still has a lead over Alcatel in this space. For the first three quarters of 2005, Juniper claimed 20.6% of the IP edge aggregation market while Alcatel held just 12.4%. As Juniper’s share is down less than one point from last year, much of Alcatel’s advance seems to have come at the expense of Cisco, whose 56.5% share of this segment is down markedly from the nearly 70% it held last year.

In addition, Synergy Research, which published the report, reclassified Juniper’s M7i and M10i routers as “high-end enterprise routers” for the first time in the third quarter report, shifting an unknown amount of Juniper’s revenue out of the IP edge routing category.

In its report, dated Nov. 15, 2005, Synergy called Alcatel’s performance in the third-quarter IP edge aggregation market “tremendous.”