Comments on: Kevin Johnson Joins Juniper as CEO

By: New Medici | Highest Paid CEOs, Disney’s Iger #3

New Medici | Highest Paid CEOs, Disney’s Iger #3 — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:25:46 +0000

[...] Kevin Johnson, Juniper Networks Inc., $36.1 [...]

By: steveballmer

steveballmer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:22:24 +0000

Who is this johnson guy?

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:52:19 +0000

Seems more like a visionary founder CEO bringing in a more operations oriented replacement to me. Juniper is big enough that operational excellence is as important as innovation and the technology. Scott’s good at the latter. Kevin’s background favors the former as he’s had IT and Operations management roles, overseen integration of acquisitions and worked closely with Ballmer and, especially, Turner.

By: Marl Balou

Marl Balou — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:16:35 +0000

Kevin Johnson is not a software person (his background is support & sales) and as President of the Windows/Live/MSN division he really did not deliver anything. (expect the Yahoo soap opera!). Just curious how this benefits Juniper (time will tell).

By: Valley Grunt

Valley Grunt — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:51:06 +0000

I suspect the news leak about where Kevin Johnson would be joining next caught Juniper PR by surprise, they probably intended to announce it a few days later after the dust had settled on his departure from MSFT.

By: It’s not a Microsoft stupid, it’s about Juniper! — Channel Marker

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:40:37 +0000

[...] obvious that Juniper is shuffling execs for some sort of strategy change. The company also recently hired Luis Avila-Marco, formerly VP of corporate strategic planning at [...]

By: Syed

Syed — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:53:12 +0000

Good post Om. It will be very interesting to see what Kevin would do at Juniper.

Though service component is a potential money spinner, traditionally when firms like Juniper competes with their own long term partners (who are service providers for ages now), historically we have seen that this model is a failure in the long run.

Eg. Enom and Directi (domain registration services companies) trying to enter into hosting space and The Planet/EV1 (hosting companies) trying to enter into domain name registration services.

By: Between the Lines mobile edition

Between the Lines mobile edition — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:33:46 +0000

[...] to the Wall Street Journal Johnson is going to lead Juniper Networks. As Om Malik notes Juniper is going to be interesting to [...]

By: Simon Newstead

Simon Newstead — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:58:45 +0000

Great post Om,

As a recent ex-Juniperite and big fan of the company, I really think they can make a big leap forward with more software smarts… especially as with NAC, UPnP etc, endpoints are becoming more aware of the network and vice versa.

The industry needs a big competitor to Cisco in enterprise market, and Juniper has a great range of products and people in the field.

Services play would be interesting, I know traditionally they had tried to not compete with their service provider partners (eg – never got into MSSP themselves before), will be interesting how this plays out..

By: Dameon Welch-Abernathy

Dameon Welch-Abernathy — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:39:12 +0000

Remember that expensive routers are nothing more than software wrapped in expensive hardware. You absolutely need a good handle on software to make and sell these boxes.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:16:12 +0000

Some folks are mentioning that Juniper could move into Services, so your comment suddenly makes a lot of sense. I think network management as a service and security as a service could be two big plays for the company. The only downside – after known Scott for 12 years, I probably would have a tough time trying to figure out new relationships :-)

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:26:24 +0000

Om,

Great post. I was thinking the exact thing. A software guy moving to a company that sells expensive routers. I don’t know the guys background. Nevertheless, very strange move.
Some time back I had heard that Juniper was considering offering SaaS apps for network management/qos and eventually moving into a business line that would compete with Linksys via an acquisition (D-Link?).