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REALITY CHECK
Last year, Cisco CEO John Chambers clearly set the network industry's priority:To increase the level of strategic engagement and directly involve network solutions in business-process reengineering - in short, to get out of the plumbing business. So this year, Cisco and archrival Juniper are doing just that, right? Hardly In fact, the two vendors seem locked in a race to the strategic bottom.
Cisco started the strategic shortfall mess with its Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) announcement. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the key IT trend of the decade, according to BusinessWeek. But at its analyst conference in December, Cisco told a stunned audience that the purpose of SONA is not to support SOA.
Cisco's actions set the bar incredibly low for Juniper - yet at its February analyst meeting, Juniper managed to shoot below it. Juniper tossed SOA into a few pitches, but the most relevant speaker on the topic was Juniper CFO Bob Dykes, who described how the company is changing its cost structure using, in part, SOA. Apparently Juniper thinks...