Juniper Networks

Juniper introduced a suite of routers for the network edge that allowed it to compete with Cisco. Juniper's edge routers had a 9% market share two months after release. Both companies made exaggerated marketing claims; Juniper promoted its products as stable enough to make IT staff bored and Cisco announced lab tests from Light Reading proved its products were superior to Juniper, whereas the publication itself reached the opposite conclusion. By 2002, both companies were repeatedly announcing products with faster specifications than the other in what Network World called a "'speeds-and-feeds' public relations contest".

By 2004, Juniper controlled 38% of the core router market. By 2007, it had a 5%, 18% and 30% share of the market for enterprise, edge and core routers respectively. Alcatel-Lucent was unsuccessful in challenging Juniper in the core router market but continued competing with Juniper in edge routers along with Cisco.

Further development

In late 2000, Juniper formed a joint venture with Ericsson to develop and market network switches for internet traffic on mobile devices, and with Nortel for fiber optic technology. In 2001, Juniper introduced a technical certification program and was involved in the first optical internet network in China. Juniper's growth slowed in 2001 as the telecommunications sector experienced a slowdown and revenues fell by two-thirds during the dot-com bust. 9 to 10% of its workforce was laid off.

Juniper had rebounded by 2004, surpassing $1 billion in revenues for the first time that year and reaching $2 billion in revenue in 2005. Beginning in 2004, with the acquisition of NetScreen, Juniper Networks began developing and marketing products for the enterprise segment. Juniper had a reputation for serving ISPs, not enterprises, which it was trying to change. By 2005, enterprise customers accounted for one-third of the company's revenues, but it had spent $5 billion in acquisitions and R&D for the enterprise market.

In 2006, more than 200 US companies restated their financial results due to a series of investigations into stock backdating practices. Juniper stockholders alleged the company engaged in deceptive backdating practices that benefited its top executives unfairly. In December 2006, Juniper restated its financials, charging $900 million in expenses to correct backdated stock options from 1999 to 2003. This was followed by a $169 million settlement with stockholders in February 2010.

2008–2025

In July 2008, Juniper's first CEO, Scott Kriens, became chairman and former Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson was appointed CEO. Johnson focused the company more on software, creating a software solutions division headed by a former Microsoft colleague, Bob Muglia. Juniper also hired other former Microsoft executives to focus on the company's software strategy and encourage developers to create software products that run on the Junos operating system. Juniper established partnerships with IBM, Microsoft and Oracle for software compatibility efforts. The SSL/VPN Pulse product family was launched in 2010, then later spun off to a private equity firm in 2014 for $250 million.

In 2012, Juniper laid off 5% of its staff and four of its high-ranking executives departed. The following year, CEO Kevin Johnson announced he was retiring once a replacement was found. In November 2013, Juniper Networks announced that Shaygan Kheradpir would be appointed as the new CEO. He started the position in January 2014.

In January 2014, hedge fund, activist investor and Juniper shareholder Elliott Associates advocated that Juniper reduce its cash reserves and cut costs, before Kheradpir was officially appointed. That February, Juniper reached an agreement with Elliott and other stakeholders for an Integrated Operating Plan (IOP) that involved repurchasing $2 billion in shares, reducing operating expenses by $160 million and appointing two new directors to its board. That April, 6% of the company's staff were laid off to cut expenses. In November 2014, Kheradpir unexpectedly resigned following a review by Juniper's board of directors regarding his conduct in a negotiation with an unnamed Juniper customer. An internal Juniper executive, Rami Rahim, took his place as CEO.

In May 2014, Palo Alto Networks agreed to pay a $175 million settlement for allegedly infringing on Juniper's patents for application firewalls.

In 2015, Wired magazine reported that the company announced it had found unauthorized code that enabled backdoors into its ScreenOS products. The code was patched with updates from the company.

Acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise

In January 2024, the company agreed to be purchased by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for $14 billion in an all-cash deal to boost HPE's networking and artificial intelligence resources. The acquisition was contested by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in January 2025, citing concerns about reduced competition and innovation, leading to higher prices for consumers. Following a settlement with the DOJ, in which HPE agreed to divest its Instant On wireless division and license the source code for Juniper's Mist AI (a key component of Juniper's WLAN products), the acquisition was completed on July 2, 2025. Following the acquisition, Juniper was absorbed into HPE Networking, with Raimi named the new head of this division. HPE will continue to market Juniper's former product line under the HPE Juniper Networking brand. Later that month, Axios reported that the U.S. Intelligence Community had earlier directly intervened to persuade DOJ to allow the acquisition, arguing that blocking the merger would have harmed U.S. companies and strengthened Chinese competitors—particularly Huawei—framing the decision as critical to national security.

By 2000, Juniper had developed five hardware systems and made seven new releases of its Junos operating system. That April, Juniper released the second generation of the internet processors embedded in its core routers. In April 2002, Juniper released the first of the T-series family (originally known under the code-name Gibson), which could perform four times as many route lookups per second as the M160. The first products of the TX Matrix family, which could be used to combine up to four T-series routers, was released in December 2004.

By 2003, Juniper had diversified into three major router applications: core routers, edge routers and routers for mobile traffic. Juniper's first major diversification from core routers was when it entered the market for edge routers, by acquiring the e-series product family (originally known as ERX) through the purchase of Unisphere in 2000. By 2002, both Cisco and Juniper had increased their focus on edge routers, because many ISPs had built up abundant bandwidth at the core. Several improvements to Juniper's software and its broadband aggregation features were released in late 2003. At this time, Juniper had the largest market-share (52%) of the broadband aggregation market. In 2003, Juniper entered the market for cable-modem termination systems with the G-series product family after the acquisition of Pacific Broadband. The product family was discontinued later that year.

Juniper's first enterprise switch product was the EX 4200, which was released in 2008. In a comparative technical test, Network World said the EX4200 was the top performer out of network switches they tested in latency and throughput, but its multicast features were "newer and less robust" than other aspects of the product. Juniper Networks announced the T1600 1.6 Terabits per second core router in 2007 and the newer T4000 4 Terabit router in 2010. In 2012, it released the ACX family of universal access routers. In 2013, the company made several new releases in the MX family of edge routers: it introduced a smaller version of its core routers called PTX3000, and several new enterprise routers were released. Seven months later, Juniper acquired WANDL, and its technology was integrated into the NorthStar WAN controller Juniper announced in February 2014.

In February 2011, Juniper introduced QFabric, a proprietary protocol methodology for transferring data over a network using a single network layer. Several individual products for the QFabric methodology were released throughout the year. In October 2013, Juniper introduced another network architecture called MetaFabric and a new set of switches, the QFX5100 family, as one of the foundations of the new architecture.

In February 2014, several software and hardware improvements were introduced for Juniper routers, including a series of software applications ISPs could use to provide internet-based services to consumers. In December 2014, Juniper introduced a network switch, OCX1100, that could run on either the Junos operating system or the Open Compute Project open-source software.

Security

Juniper Networks introduced the JProtect security toolkit in May 2003. It included firewalls, flow monitoring, filtering and Network Address Translation (NAT). Through the 2004 acquisition of NetScreen Technologies, Juniper acquired the Juniper Secure Meeting product line, as well as remote desktop access software. The NetScreen-5GT ADSL security appliance was the first new NetScreen product Juniper introduced after the acquisition and its first wireless product. The first Juniper product intended for small businesses was a remote access appliance that was released in August 2004. An open interface for the development of third-party tools for the appliance was made available that September.

In September 2004, Juniper entered the market for enterprise access routers with three routers that were the first of the J-series product family. It used the channel partners acquired with NetScreen to take the routers to market. Juniper released its first dedicated NAC product in late 2005, which was followed by the acquisition of Funk Software for its NAC capabilities for switches. According to a 2006 review in Network World, Juniper's SSG 520 firewall and routing product was "the first serious threat" to competing products from Cisco. Juniper released the SRX family of gateway products in 2008. The gateways sold well, but customers and resellers reported a wide range of technical issues starting in 2010, which Juniper did not acknowledge until 2012, when it began providing updates to the product software.

In August 2011, Juniper and AT&T announced they would jointly develop the AT&T Mobile Security application based on Juniper's Pulse security software. In May 2012, Juniper released a series of new features for the web security software it acquired from Mykonos Software that February. Mykonos' software is focused on deceiving hackers by presenting fake vulnerabilities and tracking their activity. In January 2014, Juniper announced the Firefly Suite of security and switching products for virtual machines. The following month Juniper Networks released several products for "intrusion deception", which create fake files, store incorrect passwords and change network maps in order to confuse hackers that have already penetrated the network perimeter.

An analysis of Juniper's ScreenOS firmware code in December 2015 discovered a backdoor key using Dual EC DRBG allowing to passively decrypt the traffic encrypted by ScreenOS. This backdoor was inserted in the year 2008 into the versions of ScreenOS from 6.2.0r15 to 6.2.0r18 and from 6.3.0r12 to 6.3.0r20 and gives any user administrative access when using a special master password. Some analysts claim that this backdoor still exists in ScreenOS. Stephen Checkoway was quoted in Wired that "If this backdoor was not intentional, then, in my opinion, it's an amazing coincidence."

In December 2015, Juniper Systems announced that they had discovered "unauthorized code" in the ScreenOS software that underlies their NetScreen devices, present from 2012 onwards. There were two vulnerabilities: One was a simple root password backdoor, and the other one was changing a point in Dual_EC_DRBG so that the attackers presumably had the key to use the preexisting (intentional or unintentional) kleptographic backdoor in ScreenOS to passively decrypt traffic.

Software defined networking

According to a 2014 SWOT analysis by MarketLine, in recent history Juniper had been focusing on software-defined networking (SDN). It acquired SDN company Contrail Systems in December 2012. The following month Juniper announced its SDN strategy, which included a new licensing model based on usage and new features for the Junos operating system. In February 2013, Juniper released several SDN products, including the application provisioning software, Services Activation Director and the Mobile Control Gateway appliance.

In May 2013, Juniper announced an SDN controller called JunosV Contrail, using technology it acquired through Contrail Systems. A series of SDN products were released in February 2014, such as a network management software product, Junos Fusion, and an SDN controller called NorthStar. Northstar helps find the optimal path for data to travel through a network.

Every year, since 2009, Juniper held the SDN Throwdown competition to encourage students from universities across the world to access NorthStar Controller and build a solution around it to optimize network throughput. In the 2019 competition, team led by Sumit Maheshwari (Rutgers University) took first place. Jialu Sun (Santa Clara University) led his team to a second-place finish.

Recent updates

In March 2015, Juniper announced a series of updates to the PTX family of core routers, the QFX family of switches, as well as updates to its security portfolio. According to a report published by technology consulting firm LexInnova, as of June 2015 Juniper Networks was the third largest recipient of network security-related patents with portfolio of 2,926 security-related patents.

In October 2018, Juniper announced a new offering called EngNet, which is a set of developer tools and information meant to help companies move toward automation, and replace the typical command-line interface.

Operations

Prior to its acquisition by HPE, Juniper Networks had operations in more than 100 countries. Around 50% of its revenue was from the United States, 30% was from EMEA and 20% was from Asia. Juniper sold directly to businesses, as well as through resale and distribution partners, such as Ericsson, IBM, Nokia, IngramMicro and NEC. About 50% of Juniper's revenues were derived from routers, 13% from switches, 12% from IT security and 25% from services.

According to a 2013 report by Glassdoor, Juniper Networks had the highest paid software engineers in the technology sector by a margin of about $24,000 per year. It operated the Juniper Networks Academic Alliance (JNAA) program, which scouts fresh college graduates.

According to a SWOT analysis by MarketLine, Juniper had "a strong focus" on research and development. R&D expenses had been between 22 and 25% of revenue from 2011 to 2013. Most of the company's manufacturing was outsourced to three manufacturing companies: Celestica, Flextronics and Accton Technology. Juniper operated the Junos Innovation Fund, which was started with $50 million in 2010 and invests in early-stage technology companies developing applications for the Junos operating system. As of 2011, Juniper Networks invested in 20 companies. This is estimated to be 1 to 2% of the companies it had evaluated for a potential investment.