Juniper's just-announced capabilities combine technology and partnerships in a quest to help customers reinvent the experience and economics of networking, while fostering a broad ecosystem of innovation across the network. Juniper's vision for the next decade is a future where networking is open, scalable, simple, secure and automated.

"Networks are now clearly the hub of business and community around the world, and that's driving massive scale requirements for the next decade," said Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson. "Driven by our mission to connect everything and empower everyone, Juniper believes it's time for a new approach to networking. An approach based on smart systems and open software platforms. An approach that adapts to changing business dynamics. An approach that embraces partnership and unleashes innovation."

The Decade Ahead

For software, Juniper announced a new version of Junos, an open cross-network software platform that allows customers to program multiple layers of their networks for rich user experiences, smart economics, and fast time to market.

"Our customers consistently tell us that they need to improve the economics of networking, cut back on complexity, and improve the experience for their users," said Andreas Antonopoulos, senior vice president and founding partner at Nemertes Research. "Open platforms that enable fast innovation will be critical in the decade ahead."

Meanwhile, a new Junos One family of processors includes the Junos Trio chipset with 3-D scaling that lets networks dynamically support more subscribers, services and bandwidth -- at the same time.

Partnerships in the Cloud

Juniper also unveiled new cloud-networking and security solutions based on the Junos software platform and Juniper systems. The solutions are built upon Juniper's data-center network architecture and aim to help customers share and secure their infrastructures while delivering and accessing cloud-based services.

Finally, Juniper announced new partnerships with Dell and IBM to deliver Juniper systems as part of their cloud-ready data-center solutions. Juniper also announced a Junos software licensing partnership with Blade Network Technologies, which will develop future blade switches based on the Junos operating system.

"The vision of the new network is a good vision. A lot of the details of how they are going to deliver that new vision are missing. Juniper didn't give many details," said Zeus Kerravala, a vice president at the Yankee Group. "Some more details were needed."

Can Juniper Deliver Quickly Enough?

Juniper also unveiled a new corporate brand identity to reflect the company's expanded portfolio, which now includes software, silicon and systems for routing, switching and security across enterprise and service-provider markets worldwide.

Although the new logo is interesting, Kerravala said it's not ultimately going to matter to buyers. Juniper's success or failure is going to depend on whether the company can deliver on its new vision quickly enough.

"Juniper is not really well known in the enterprise networking space nor the data center. They've got catch-up to do. So their partnerships are going to be important and the speed at which they get their products to market is going to be important," Kerravala said. "If you believe no news is good news, then it was all good news."