Juniper Networks Inc. Wednesday
leveraged its alliance with the worldwide sales force of Ericsson LM Telephone Co. to set up
routers for two new international clients.
Last year, Juniper was a start up router manufacturer
with a promising product line, but no international connections to market
its products.
Funding to the tune of $60 million poured in from companies like Lucent Technologies Inc., and Nortel Networks
Corporate Holding Co., but Ericsson
bought into Juniper with enough cash to get on its board of
directors.
Pan-European IP carrier IPERGY
Communications Inc., and Korean backbone provider Internet Business Resources are
Juniper’s newest customers. The International companies are incorporating
Juniper routers into the next-generation backbone services, as a result fo
Juniper’s association with Ericsson.
Michael Ferioli, IPERGY managing director, said Juniper’s M20 and M40
routers support its expanding plans for Europe and the U.S.
“We looked at various IP Internet backbone routers, but Juniper Networks
was the only company that shipped products that were capable of wire rate
STM-16 IP routing,” Ferioli said. “In addition, our rapidly growing
customer base and the increasing demand for data traffic dictate us to be
prepared to scale our network operations.”
Ferioli said the routers allowed his OC-48 backbone to take advantage of
multi-protocol label switching, a standards-approved technology for
speeding up network traffic flow and managing bandwidth.
The advantage of MLPS is it allows network traffic to be forwarded at the
layer 2 switching, rather than level 3 routing. Layer 2 switching is
preferred by carriers and network operations centers because it doesn’t
make packet decisions, it simply forwards packets directly to nodes.
Korea is in desperate need of backbone expansion to accommodate business
customers. IBR has rolled out its own OC-3 optical network to meed the
demand for bandwidth. Its facility-based neutral private Internet exchange
allows businesses customer to bypass Korea’s often-congested public
network, and take advantage of voice over IP services and streaming media.
Jason Ryu, IBR chief executive officer, said he had to look at several
options before deciding to go with Juniper’s routers.
“The neutral private Internet exchange-type service has been widely
accepted as the next-generation solution for business-to-consumer and
business-to-business Internet networking in the United States,” Ryu said.
“In order for the technique to work effectively, the service provider’s
infrastructure has to be top notch, built around the latest and most
advanced networking equipment. In the case of IBR, extensive testing
determined that Juniper Networks M40 routers were the most capable of
providing the performance we were looking for.”
