Aug 18, 2006 12:27 PM,

Juniper touts sliding market share

By Ed Gubbins

Juniper Networks this week touted having held its place as the world's number-two supplier of service provider routers in the second quarter, even as its share of that market slipped sequentially.

Juniper's 18% share of the second-quarter service provider routing market was down from nearly 22% in the first quarter, according to Synergy Research. Its share of the service provider core router market slid from 38% in the first quarter to 34.5% in the second.

Juniper also remained in second place in the broadband remote access server and multiservice edge routing markets, with about 32% and 19% shares, respectively, in the quarter.

Though Juniper has held the second-place slot in the service provider routing market for more than four years, the vendor adopted the habit of publicly reaffirming its market position on a quarterly basis last year, when rival Alcatel became a more threatening presence in the space.

But while a Synergy analyst credited Juniper with "another strong quarter" in a press release the router vendor issued in May, Synergy described merely "another steady quarter" for Juniper in the vendor's release this week.

In a separate release this week, Synergy called Juniper the world's third-place supplier of carrier Ethernet equipment. In that market, which in the second quarter was double the size it was a year earlier, Juniper saw 131% growth year-over-year, while market leader Cisco Systems saw 105% growth, and second-place Alcatel saw 452% growth. Foundry Networks and Extreme Networks rounded out the top five, in that order, with 13% and 31% growth.