Category: Uncategorized

Juniper’s Q4 might mean an upbeat Q2 for Cisco

Juniper’s blow out Q4 may portend a stellar quarter from rival Cisco as well. Cisco reports next Tuesday and some analysts expect the company to come in ahead of estimates.

Meanwhile, Juniper’s strength was due largely to service providers, sales in the Americas, and yes, some enterprise growth year-over-year – but sequentially, enterprise was essentially flat. AT&T was better than 10% of Juniper’s sales in the quarter and sales to service providers grew 22% sequentially.

In a bulletin on the quarter, Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Ittai Kidron states that AT&T may have been responsible for better than 50% of Juniper’s sequential sales growth in the quarter.

Sales in the Americas also grew 22% from Q3 and service providers gobbled up almost one-third of Juniper’s $246 million in Service Layer Technology sales in the quarter.

Though enterprise only grew 1% sequentially, it did grow 5% year-over-year and 11% for the full year. Sales of Juniper’s EX LAN switches were up 47% sequentially to $74 million and the SRX security gateway grew 38% from Q3.

For Q1 2010, Juniper is guiding toward sales of $880 million to $910 million, and earnings per share of $0.23-$0.26. This is better than Wall Street consensus estimates of 873.2 million and $0.24, but a dip from the $941 million and $.32 results for Q4.

Oppenheimer’s Kidron is nonetheless upbeat on the guidance:

We’re…pleased with 1Q10 guidance, which tops our prior and Street expectations and is supported by strong deferred revenues. Importantly, management’s commentary on 2010 was upbeat with Juniper aiming to exceed the growth of its addressable markets, gain share and expand operating margins at the same time. Juniper’s growth story continues to play out well with IBM/Dell set to contribute more in 2010…Juniper plans to gain share and surpass 2010 market growth.

Juniper plans to grow market share 12% to 15% in service providers in 2010, and in enterprise in the mid-single digits.

Avian Securities’ Catharine Trebnick found Juniper’s guidance targets “mediocre.” In a report on the quarter, she remains negative on Juniper:

Our cautious stance remains predicated on longer term challenges in the service provider segment we attribute to three key trends: (1) Operators shift toward less expensive Ethernet platforms and this is driving down price per port for routers; (2) JNPR is missing key partnerships for packet optical networks with key RFP’s underway (Verizon Packet Optical RFP), and (3) JNPR still lacks wireless DNA and project Falcon timing is available after key LTE supplier decisions. In addition we believe that the HPQ/3COM merger has the potential to squeeze JNPR’s efforts, which currently is benefiting from strong growth in managed services and DC upgrades for 10 GigE ports.

Lazard Capital Markets also found that Juniper’s guidance “implies a steeper sequential decline than expected.”

Cisco backdoor still open

The “backdoors” that Cisco and other networking companies implement in their routers and switches for lawful intercept are front and center again at this week’s Black Hat security conference. A few years ago, they were cause celebre in some VoIP wiretapping arguments and court rulings.

This time, an IBM researcher told Black Hat conference attendees that these openings can still expose information about us to hackers and allow them to “watch” our Internet activity. Backdoors are implemented in routers and switches so law enforcement officials can track the Internet communications and activity of an individual or individuals under surveillance. They are required by law to be incorporated in devices manufactured by networking companies and sold to ISPs.

In this report from Forbes, IBM Internet Security Systems researcher Tom Cross demonstrated how easily the backdoor in Cisco IOS can be exploited by hackers. When they gain access to a Cisco router, they are not blocked after multiple failed access attempts nor is an alert sent to an administrator. Any data collected through the backdoor can be sent to anywhere — not just merely to an authorized user, Forbes reports.

What’s more, an ISP is not able to perform an audit trail on whoever tried to gain access to a router through the backdoor – that nuance was intended to keep ISP employees from detecting the intercept and inadvertently tipping off the individual under surveillance. But according to IBM’s Cross, any authorized employee can use it for unauthorized surveillance of users and those privacy violations cannot be tracked by the ISP.

Cisco said it is aware of Cross’s assertions and is taking them under consideration. To Cisco’s credit, it is the only networking company that makes its lawful intercept architecture public, according to the recommendations of the IETF, the Forbes story states. Other companies do not, which means they may be susceptible to the same security flaws, or worse.

Juniper, Polycom team up for telepresence

Juniper and Polycom this week announced an alliance to offer telepresence and video conferencing services to enterprises through service providers.

The two companies have integrated their respective network resource control and video call control platforms to enable dynamic signaling between the two. Together, they say they can enable Juniper service provider customers to offer managed telepresence and video conferencing services to enterprises.

The deal represents the latest partnership Polycom has fostered with a large vendor following Cisco’s acquisition of Polycom rival Tandberg. Last week, Polycom lined up Siemens Enterprise Networks as an ally, and IBM a few weeks previous.

The alliances are viewed by observers as a response by both Polycom and these vendors to the Cisco/Tandberg marriage and to the expected explosion in demand for video as a key component of unified communications deployments among businesses.

“I still think Cisco has an advantage,” says Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group, noting the company’s market share and three-year focus on video/telepresence. “If you own [the network] end-to-end you can control the quality end-to-end — you don’t have to wait for standards to be developed, you just go do it yourself.”

A multivendor system interoperable through standards may not improve video/telepresence quality either, Kerravala notes, because of other nuances with the different vendors’ systems in the way they treat video traffic.

Citing data from Gartner and Frost and Sullivan, Juniper and Polycom say the global market for visual communication managed services will grow from $83 million to $940 million between 2008 and 2015, a 162% compounded annual rate. Visual communications products and services is projected to reach $8.6 billion in 2013, they say, a CAGR of 17.8% from 2008.

The integrated Juniper/Polycom products will be available to service providers in mid-2010. At that time, the companies will disclose packaging and pricing options, officials from both companies say. The joint offering will facilitate a “conferencing-aware” network for service providers rather than a video/telepresence overlay to networks not necessarily optimized for video, the companies say.

Juniper says it may also offer Polycom-based video/telepresence to enterprises through other channel partners in the future.

The combined system includes Juniper’s Junos Space network application platform and its subscriber policy and identity services, MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routers, announced last fall, and SRX Series Services Gateways; and Polycom’s portfolio of telepresence and visual communication products, including the Distributed Media Application that centralizes call control.

The combination of Junos Space with DMA enables a dynamic coordinated allocation of video and network resources, driven by user video session needs, the companies say.

From: Network world
Buy: used juniper equipment

linux is so useful

It is so amazingly fast to get things done when you have a few linux boxes in the network. We are doing a few things to optimize our admittedly staid website, and those changes will roll out over the next few months.

I added wordpress to the server and linked it in quickly since it is packaged so nicely. Just ssh in, quickly type in the things to do, and we are up and running. Nice!

Buy network equipment locally to save money

Even though it is very convenient to look up pricing for servers, switches, routers, firewalls and the like online, that is the worst way to purchase. I have been on the inside of IT sales for a long time, and can give you many reasons why you should by from a local Value Added Reseller, as they are known:

1. Best price. If you talk with a local reseller, and either pretend or actually let them help make a recommendation on what products to buy, they can have a better cost than anyone else, usually about 10%. The reason is very simple: manufacturer’s give better pricing to resellers that recommend their equipment, and who tell the manufacturer that they are doing so.

2. Best service. If you buy from a local reseller, the employees and business owners live in the same state, county, or even town as you. They will want to keep you happy, and will go out of the way to make you happy with your purchase. If something is defective, or there is a misunderstanding, they can drive right over to look at it and make it right.

3. The money stays in the community. With money and budgets tight these days, many communities are passing local preference ordinances, stating that if a local supplier quotes a product or service to a public sector purchasing entity that is within 5% of the lowest price, that the business should be kept local. This only makes sense. As long as you are spending money, and you can get it for a good price (see #1 above), keep the taxes local and let the profits on the sale go to the salaries of your neighbors or relatives!

4. Your project will be more successful. Any VAR that is any good will have a staff of technical consultants that has done the same upgrade you are thinking about doing many times before. They will know how to plan for the upgrade, gather the right info, what pitfalls to avoid, and how to work around the undocumented features (bugs!) in the product. Don’t just assume they know what they are doing, though, ask for references.

5. You will build contacts in your local market. Local VAR’s know about every IT shop in town, and through their contacts can pass along information about what other people are doing. Sales reps bring useful information, ideas, and gossip about what your peers are doing. Hey, with layoffs happening all around, it is good to have a number of friends in the business, especially ones that owe you favors.

So with all these great reasons to buy local, why doesn’t everyone do it? That’s a question I often ask; sometimes I think the five reasons I listed above just don’t matter much to people.

What I do find is that most organizations in the metropolitan areas buy from local resellers, and many rural K-12, higher education, counties, and cities buy from online outfits like CDW. CDW inside sales reps do a great job providing attention to folks in rural areas, and the CDW website is very well done. Furthermore, it is admittedly more convenient to fill a shopping cart online and send an order without having to meet with a sales rep. They also make incredible profits on items that are under $500. There is a reason they can afford all those advertisements on TV, and it is not because they are passing any good deals onto you.

Meetings take time out of the day and force IT people do deal with salespeople, who are the last people that the technically minded and results focused IS administrator wants to deal with. That is definitely one of the downsides of buying locally. However, every job has its downsides, and meeting with salespeople is certainly less onerus than say, staying up all night rebuilding Active Directory because a junior IT admin somehow hosed the schema, or troubleshooting a switching loop that took down the entire network and everyone is screaming at you because all the phones, computers, and servers are not communicating on the network, or realizing the backup that you thought was being done every night actually wasn’t for the past 3 months….and that you really need that backup right now!

In fact, compared to many of the more dreadful things that can happen to the Information Technology crew, meeting with a sales rep and their technical pre-sales design engineer, going out to lunch, and having these nice vendors to blame all your problems on is actually quite pleasant.

So, let management and purchasing know that you are going to be doing your part to save money and help your community by buying everying locally from now on!