Juniper's, Cisco's products face off in core router space

Competition in the IP core router space ignited last week as the market's leading suppliers traded dueling announcements amid a shifting landscape of vendors.

Juniper Networks unveiled its new IP core routing platform, the TX Matrix, which can be used to combine up to four of the vendor's existing T640 core routers for a total capacity of up to 2.5 Tb/s. Juniper used the 2/3-rack TX Matrix to decry the needless enormity of Cisco Systems' full-rack CRS-1 router, which scales to 92 Tb/s. (Some wondered whether the announcement was timed to rain on Cisco's analyst conference last week.) But Cisco countered the next day by unveiling an 8-slot half-rack version of the 16-slot CRS-1 that offers 640 Gb/s.

Cisco got even more attention by announcing customers for the CRS-1, which debuted amid much anticipation in May. In addition to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Yahoo Broadband has deployed 10 CRS-1s and 10 of the half-size version, Cisco said. Juniper's TX Matrix is only in trials.

With core routing's long sales cycles, it will take several months to know how the new products fare against each other. Juniper has been eating away at Cisco's market share in the core, gaining nearly 9 points in the last four quarters while Cisco lost about 7 points. But Cisco still dominates, with nearly 70% of the market to Juniper's nearly 30%. Infonetics Research analyst Kevin Mitchell wonders if Cisco's share drop was because of buyers refrained from ordering Cisco gear in anticipation of the May release of CRS-1.

Cisco senior vice president Mike Volpi told analysts last week that the CRS-1 probably won't begin to noticeably affect Cisco's market share until the second quarter of next (calendar) year.

Juniper has the advantage of being able to assure the more than 75 carriers with T640s that they can install the TX Matrix without ripping out their existing line cards or having to learn a new operating system (OS), said Infonetics' Mitchell, whereas the CRS-1 has a new OS and requires a forklift, which leaves the door open for other vendors to compete, even for existing Cisco customers.

“Juniper has the better investment-protection story and operational learning curve,” Mitchell said.

Once sales are made, however, Cisco hopes the hyper-scalable CRS-1 will keep customers from straying for a long time. As Volpi told analysts, there are two reasons carriers buy core routers: to solve a specific pain point in a constrained network or to build for the long term.

“We're particularly advanced in the latter category,” he said. “We're promising that long-term scale as opposed to tack-ons or add-ons.”

Cisco and Juniper's moves come amid a broader turbulence in the cramped core router vendor crowd. The market's third-place vendor, Avici Systems, has been faltering lately, widening its quarterly net loss to more than triple its revenue and replacing its CEO, Steve Kaufman, with an interim last month. Meanwhile, start-up Chiaro Networks finally found a big-brother partner in Israeli optical vendor ECI Telecom, which will exclusively distribute Chiaro's Enstara router and invest $6 million in the company with an option to acquire it later. Another start-up in the game, Axiowave Networks — led by Mukesh Chatter, who sold core router vendor Nexabit to Lucent Technologies — shed most of its staff last month after its only customer, Aleron Broadband, was acquired by Cogent Communications, which dismantled the network.

A 2003 Yankee Group report predicted the market would contain no more than four vendors by mid-2005.