It was a busy week for the folks at Juniper Networks (JNPR). First, the company announced its quarterly earnings, beating Wall Street estimates for revenue and EPS. Next Juniper announced a new relationship with Dell (DELL) in which Dell will brand Juniper Networking Equipment as its own.

These events stand out on their own but to top it off, Juniper held a high-brow event with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) yesterday to highlight a flurry of announcements featuring:

* A new chip set. Juniper announced its Trio chip set claiming that it represents a quantum leap in 3-D scaling (i.e. the ability to scale network bandwidth, the number of users per device, and the number of applications per device). Juniper says that Trio can offer a 50x performance improvement.

* Operating system extensions. Building upon its JUNOS operating system, Juniper introduced Juniper Space, a development environment and application portfolio on top of JUNOS, and Juniper Pulse, an endpoint play that brings network services together under a common agent.

* A vision for the future. While details were few, Juniper talked about its Data Center to Cloud (DC2C) strategy, its “Project Stratus” initiative to virtualize data center-based L2 networks and security services, and “Project Falcon,” an initiative focused on wireless carrier services.

There is a lot to think about with these announcements but my overall reaction is simply — Wow! Juniper Networks, that geeky company that couldn’t talk to anyone without referring to multiple layers of the OSI stack has really grown up. This was a classy event held at the NYSE (coincidentally 80 years to the day of the stock market crash of 1929) with an audience full of financial folks, industry analysts, and customers.

As for the real “meat” of these announcements, the Trio chip stands alone. In one fell swoop, Juniper just leap frogged the competition on price/performance and “green” requirements while producing a multi-function chip set that will ultimately lower its manufacturing and support costs.

The jury is still out of SPACE and PULSE. Both have great potential but success in these endeavors will be a function of applications and partnerships. Juniper has some momentum in both areas but must build its own applications, dedicate internal resources to establishing a developer community, and recruit partners for this to really matter in the long term. My guess is that Juniper will accomplish these objectives easily in the service provider space, but the enterprise market will be a much bigger challenge.

Juniper’s vision stuff is extremely interesting. Yes, there are a lot of “blue sky” concepts here but large organizations like NYSE and DISA are buying in. Juniper tends to deliver — rather than change — its strategy over time.

Many journalists and analysts have written that Juniper was long on vision and short on details which is true. Juniper actually knew this going into this announcement. This makes it important for Juniper to follow up on each of these announcement over the next few months with products, sales programs, customer success stories, and roadmaps. Again, this is a lay up in the service provider space so Juniper’s real challenge is aggressively executing in the enterprise where Cisco (CSCO)  rules.

One other note. These announcements should open doors for Juniper but it must be prepared for discussions beyond technology alone. Juniper should have detailed migration methodologies for customers and prospects that map out which pieces of the network to replace first, ROI benefits associated with these moves, and long-term migration strategies that meet customer business, IT, and network requriements moving forward. Enterprise-savvy partner IBM (IBM) can help here.

Ironically, Juniper also unveiled its new logo and welcomed the “new network” in its advertising but never mentioned it in its presentation. I find the new logo and tag line fitting. The network is radically changing which calls for new techology and innovation. Juniper is delivering here. The logo also symbolizes a new Juniper. Yes, there’s still a bit too much network-speak at times, but Kevin Johnson’s team represents a new Juniper that can not only deliver innovative technology but it can finally tell you about it even if you don’t have a PhD.

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1. Juniper’s New Network Gains Traction
2. Jumpin’ Juniper
3. The Cisco Squeeze
4. Brocade Could Go On a Shopping Spree
5. Juniper and Q1 Labs

Tags: Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, DISA, Juniper Networks, NYSE