Juniper CEO boasts Ethernet validation

In Juniper Networks’ fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, CEO Scott Kriens continued to tough-talk carrier Ethernet equipment vendors. But this time, he had more numbers to back him up.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a carrier Ethernet segment worth counting when the history’s written here,” Kriens said Thursday, essentially reiterating comments he made in late 2006, when he predicted that the company’s latest router, the MX960, would be “the end of the carrier Ethernet market segment.”

If not the end of carrier Ethernet, the MX line has at least shown some impressive results in its first year of life. Revenue from MX router sales doubled sequentially in the fourth quarter, reaching a run rate of more than $200 million annually in only its fourth quarter of availability. And that growth should continue, Kriens said.

Juniper unveiled the MX960 in late 2006 after months of criticism suggesting that the vendor wasn’t doing enough to meet demand for Ethernet aggregation in edge networks, thus allowing competitors such as Alcatel-Lucent to gain market share with a combination of Ethernet switches and IP/MPLS routers. In keeping with Juniper’s historical strategy, the vendor opted to meet competitors at the edge by starting in the core. Though it contained a mix of Layer 2 and Layer 3 technology, the large, dense 480-Gb/s MX960 was Juniper’s most Ethernet-centric product to date. The company followed that with a smaller edge version, the MX480, last summer. An even smaller version, the MX240, begins shipping this quarter.

Last November, the Dell’Oro Group reported that sales of Ethernet routers were poised to overtake that of Ethernet switches.

In Thursday’s earnings call, Kriens said the choice to deploy the MX gear is less often guided by an evaluation of the hardware and more often an expression of carriers’ preference for Juniper’s Junos operating system, which runs all of its products. “If we continue to see the success of our strategy in that regard, we’ll see its affects on all our products,” he said.