Juniper CTO: Cisco has too many operating systems

Do you see certain applications -- say, in the metro area -- where PBT is more beneficial than MPLS?

I personally don't. PBT is essentially a different implementation of all of the MPLS concepts, with the exception that it is done over Ethernet encapsulation as opposed to over MPLS encapsulation. So that is not a substantive difference. What is painful to see is that if we do actually have to do this we will be replicating functionality, which is unnecessary.

In the enterprise market with your new EX switching line, what specifically is Juniper doing differently than all of Cisco's other competitors that haven't been able to gain more than 5 per cent market share?

The Ethernet market is now going on 25 years, maybe 30 years. Ethernet has evolved a lot. Many of the companies that have been in the market for a long time, the operating systems that they have, the code and the implementation that they have reflect the total history of Ethernet along the way. And the same thing that happened in the IP world where, when Juniper came in routers were already a decade old. But we did not have to pay attention to the multiprotocol world that routers had traveled to. The same way when we entered the switching market we don't have to care so much about every detail of the place where Ethernet had been. So our implementation will be a lot cleaner, they can be a lot meaner, and by having the feature set match the current needs as opposed to what the needs were along the way, I think our implementation is going to be advantaged. They can be much more reliable, much more scalable, secure and they can be high performance.

Will the NetScreen VPN and firewall products eventually go the way of the Kagoor session border controllers and Redline DX application accelerators you acquired, and be integrated into Juniper routers?

All the functionality of firewalls and deep packet inspection is actually being rewritten on top of JUNOS. That effort, which is now going on two-and-a-half years, is well along on its way. Of course we will support the NetScreen products for a long time. But all of the new development will be on JUNOS. We're going to replace ScreenOS with JUNOS. This, we believe, is absolutely the right way to do it. I don't want to give any time frames, but our effort is well along on its way.