22 / 88
EuroWire – July 2010
20
Transat lant ic Cable
Another respondent, Jay Pil Choi, a professor of economics
❈
❈
at Michigan State University, supports Mr Darlin’s view
that the telecom industry, and the buying public, should
be grateful for the Ms Watanabes of this world. Mr Choi,
author of a much-quoted treatise on herd behaviour and
“the penguin effect,” noted the value of the early adopters’
service as guinea pigs for the rest of us. He contrasted
them with consumers who strive for value and take the
wait-and-see approach. In a marketplace dominated by
persons of such little civic-mindedness, new products will
either never take off or take much longer to succeed. Of the
pioneers, Mr Choi said, “Their early purchase allows the firms
to go down the learning curve and enables a lower price for
other consumers.”
Juniper signals its intention of standing
up to ever-stiffer data centre competition
Jim Duffy, who covers service providers for networkworld.com,
saw a very direct challenge to Cisco Systems and HP, among
others, in the mid-May announcement by Juniper Networks
(Sunnyvale, California) of switches and routers designed to
flatten and simplify legacy networks.
In this view, the Juniper rollout takes aimat Cisco’s Nexus switches
and other data centre network wares, even as it sets the stage for
Juniper’s Project Stratus. This “converged data centre fabric” was
unveiled in early 2009 but is still short of delivery by as much as
a year. (“Juniper Seeks to Out-Virtualize Cisco in Data Centers,”
20
th
May). Juniper apparently is set on distinguishing itself
from other designers and sellers of high-performance Internet
Protocol network products and services. Accordingly, the
company’s IP product line is organised around the virtualisation
technologies in increasing use within the most computing- and
networking-intensive sites. “Virtualization levels the network
playing field,” the Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala told
networkworld.com. “The vendor that solves that problem first
has a huge upside.”
The challenge for Juniper, according to Mr Duffy, is that
Cisco (San Jose, California) has been targeting virtualisation
from the networking side for several years. Server titans
such as HP and IBM (a Juniper partner in Stratus) have been
tackling it “from the computer side” even longer. “Meanwhile,”
Mr Duffy wrote, “Brocade [also in San Jose] points out that it
has been building data center fabrics with partners for years
and that Juniper remains vague about how it will support
legacy storage networks.” So the time has come for Juniper
to deliver on the bold pronouncements whose timing was