I spent the day at Juniper’s analyst and media event at the New York Stock Exchange. The event was filled with pomp and circumstance as Juniper launched its largest marketing campaign in recent history, and maybe the company’s history. Juniper updated the analyst and press community on its vision, announced some new products but left many questions unanswered some of which are new and some are holdovers from the “old” Juniper.

The first and most obvious change was the corporate logo change. Gone is juniper plant and dark blue font and enter a much simpler logo that highlights the “IP” in the logo.

Only time will tell whether the new logo has any impact on they way the company is perceived, but I do remember when Cisco changed its logo, Juniper issued a fake press release stating it saw no need to change its logo. In fact, I still have the t-shirt they sent along with it. So, what’s changed? What’s changed is the approach Juniper is taking to networking as the company is finally thinking along the lines of being a “platform” vendor. The concept of “network as a platform” is a vision that Yankee Group has been articulating for years so it’s nice to see one of the major networking vendors moving in this direction.

As for the actual announcements at the event themselves, here were the highlights:

• Re-articulation of the “single OS” message and push of “Junos” as the brand. This has been Juniper’s key marketing message for the past few years. I actually think it has some merit, and I think Juniper’s done a good job of quantifying the benefits, but it does have some holes. First, Juniper isn’t a single OS company. While it has Junos, ScreenOS (from Netscreen) lives on. In fact, the new high density top of rack switch is an OEM from Blade Network Technologies so Juniper has some way to go to get to a single OS. Also, I think most organizations do not really consider the OS as part of the network equipment purchase, so Juniper has a lot of work ahead to make the OS matter. I think it can matter, but it’s going to require a shift in thinking.

• Launch of the long awaited Trio chipset—formerly known as the code name “trinity” —and service provider routers MX 960 and MX 80. This was, by far, the beefiest part of the day. The Trio chipsets (for which there are 4—does anyone else find that confusing?) are a leap ahead in silicon technology. CTO Pradeep Sindhu went through all the technical aspects of the product – 65nm technology, 1.2 billion transistors, 604GB IO performance, etc, which most people won’t understand but he did give some stats that people could get, like being able to download the whole library of congress in 12 seconds. The performance specs of MX 960 and MX 80 are through the roof compared to competitive products. Service providers are the bread and butter for Juniper and these products will keep Juniper ahead of the curve.

• Launch of Junos Space and Junos Pulse. Space is an open platform for ISVs to develop network enhanced applications on. It includes an APIs, SDKs and applications that will act as a “platform” for application development. It follows a trend that Extreme started a number of years ago (although Extreme never managed to monetize it). More recently, Cisco launched its AXP developer program and announced a number of ISV partners with it. The concept of Space is fine but I would have liked to have seen some third party examples of Junos based applications. The three Juniper showed off were created by Juniper and, while this is interesting, it’s not fulfilling on the vision of a third party ISV program. It alluded to partnered applications but didn’t show any. Pulse is a unified end point application. The concept is that all clients that IT departments need to put on the various end points are collapsed into one client. Initial uses are for WAN acceleration, dynamic security and location aware services. Overall a good start but the proof will come in Junipers ability to attract third party ISV partners.

• David Yen went over the Juniper data center to cloud vision. I was highly disappointed here. The majority of David’s presentation was great but was a repeat of the vision that the company outlined when it launched Stratus, its joint project with IBM. There was a “3 steps to cloud” network roadmap given that was “simplify, secure and shared” which isn’t really anything new. What was missing was much of the detail on what exactly Stratus is. This includes how Juniper plans to address the storage connectivity challenges in a data center which is currently dominated by Cisco and Brocade, when a product will be available, etc. It’s great vision, but it’s still just a vision and needs more detail to be tangible.

However, despite all of the fanfare, the conference did leave many open questions regarding its long term strategy including:

• How it leverages the opportunity in mobile environments. As we said after the acquisition of Starent by Cisco, the single largest opportunity for layer 2/3 equipment is in the mobile markets. In fact, Juniper had a rolling counter that showed the number of clients attached to a network—a visual just to show you how massive this opportunity is going to be. However, the majority of vendors in this space go to market with a single, mobile and fixed solutions approach. When Juniper’s partner-to-be, Starent, was snatched up by Cisco, Juniper was left wanting. However, Juniper did outline a project “Falcon” that appears to be a reference architecture to deliver on the core transport part of the mobile environment, but it’s not clear who the partners might be.

• What its wireless LAN strategy is. There’s no doubt that 802.11n is going to have a significant impact on the way companies design the corporate networks. Juniper, who has a great desire to be an end to end vendor, has a huge hole in its product line by not having a WLAN solution. Industry rumor is that Juniper is building its own but that’s likely to not be ready until next year and limited to just branch environments meaning Juniper might miss the initial wave of 11n deployments.

• How it will address future product innovation. Juniper had been a company that hadn’t been shy to acquire. Some were successful (Unisphere, Netscreen) and some not so much (Peribit, Redline) but it did use acquisition for innovation. Today it seems the single OS vision is driving Juniper to build more than buy and this could slow down their innovation. For example, it could have acquired any number of Ethernet switch vendors (Force10, Foundry, Extreme) instead of building its own. Sure it wouldn’t have been Junos based, but they would have a larger share of the pie by now.

Overall my biggest question for Juniper is how a mid sized company like Juniper competes long term in this ever evolving industry. The majority of Juniper’s competitive environment is huge multifaceted companies like Alcatel Lucent, Cisco, Huawei and others. These companies go to market with a unified wired, wireless and services solution and Juniper, at its size, can’t compete along those lines. The enterprise space has Cisco and HP as well as smaller organizations that are very deep in a certain area (like Brocade in the data center). Juniper again, falls somewhere in the middle. Juniper is too small and doesn’t have the right mindset to grow significantly through acquisition but it’s too big to be an acquisition candidate for all but a few companies, most of which have too much competitive overlap. So for now, the vision of what Juniper announced is fine, but all of us Juniper watchers will be looking to see how quickly they can get there.