Cisco vs. Juniper

For last 15 years we are witnesses of constant battle between Cisco and Juniper. The argument began in 1996 with Juniper founding; until then, Cisco had ruled in both the enterprise and service provider markets since its founding in 1984.

Juniper first year was sponsored by AT&T, 3Com, Ericsson, Lucent, Nortel, Siemens/Newbridge Networks and UUNET. At that time Juniper started their serious competition for service provider segment. The Juniper position was strengthened by IBM decision to develop new ASIC for their Internet routers, the first of which was M40.

Cisco isn't standing still. It's been re-energized by the emergence of Juniper and the recent gains of Alcatel-Lucent in service provider edge routing. In 2009, Alcatel-Lucent leapfrogged Juniper's nine-year hold on the No. 2 market share position in the service provider edge, according to Dell'Oro Group. 

And Cisco still holds the lion's share of the enterprise and service provider router market, with a customer base that's mostly loyal to its incumbency. But it is Cisco and Juniper that try to leapfrog each other technologically in the service provider core and edge. Right now, the multi-chassis core race pits Cisco's Carrier Routing System against Juniper's T Series for tens – even hundreds -- of terabits supremacy.

Juniper is taking the battle to enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments. Emboldened by its success in carrier routing, Juniper unveiled enterprise Ethernet switches two years ago in an attempt to become a credible alternative to Cisco's dominance in that market, too. The company believes it can carve a niche in the elite networking arenas of financial trading, high-performance computing and other demanding enterprise environments just like it did in service provider routing.

In the data center, both companies are surrounding themselves with high-profile partners to help push their competing visions: Cisco with EMC and VMware, and Juniper with IBM. At stake, just as in service provider routing, is a multibillion dollar opportunity – $85 billion in private clouds by 2015, according to Cisco – to become the primary supplier of next-generation data centers, further entrench new and existing customers, and lock its rival out of lucrative, big ticket accounts.