EoW July 2010

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

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EuroWire – July 2010