Data Footprints by Generations

As data is continuously collected and created, companies have difficulty just storing it, missing any opportunity to leverage the information. The wave of big data has the potential to flip the burden of data management into the opportunity of new value creation. Yesterday’s solutions don’t accomplish this today and will be even less effective tomorrow.

While the volume of data has grown exponentially over the last few decades, the fundamental and underlying technology on which we store data hasn’t. Sure, we’ve had improvements in densities (to store more data) and connectivity (to provide better access to data), but the pace of data growth has overwhelmed the benefits of these technological advancements.

For the first time in history, data operating at memory speeds (cost effectively) is a reality due to flash memory. Importantly, this trend is not just about the elimination of spinning media – that’s important and enabled by persistence – but is also about the degree to which the infrastructure around spinning disk is outdated. Namely protocols (e.g., SCSI) that assume slow, spinning disks are the primary storage medium, which introduce latencies that are untenable.

What’s most interesting about the big data explosion, and the role of flash, is the degree to which value will be created from data. Specifically, there is the opportunity to significantly impact organizational productivity and the potential to disrupt entire industry structures.

25 Facts Partners Should Know About Juniper Networks

1> The company was founded by a former Xerox principal scientist, Pradeep Sindu, who came up with the idea for Juniper after a sabbatical working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

2> Sindu started his company with $200,000 in venture capital money and a team compiled of veterans from Sun, MCI and StrataCom.

3> Juniper went public in 1999 with a splash: its first day valuation nearly tripled from start to finish.

4> Last year Juniper made $4.093 billion in revenue.

5> Back in 2009, Juniper announced that it would cut executive pay to fuel a 15 percent increase in R&D.

6> Through first quarter of 2011, Juniper's stock has risen 23 percent in the last year and net revenue increased by 21 percent.

7> Juniper employs more than 8,700 employees worldwide.

8> The networking company has offices in 53 countries that service more than 30,000 customers and partners worldwide.

9> Juniper's customer base includes 130 global service providers and 96 of the Global Fortune 100.

10> Since April 2010, Juniper has acquired six companies--an impressive feat for an organically grown company that had only 11 acquisitions to its name prior to then.

11> Juniper's 2010 spending spree included laying out close to $100 million for SMobile, $152 million for Trapeze Networks and $95 million for Altor Networks.

12> Most recently the company purchased Brilliant Telecommunications, a manufacturer of packet-based, network synchronization equipment and monitoring solutions, for approximately $4.5 million in February.

13> Before it's recent spending spree, the last acquisition the company made was way back in 2005 – a five year gap.

14> The company's lack of M&A activity in that interim could likely be partially attributed to a four-year-long investigation into stock option backdating that ended only in February 2010--the company paid $169 million to settle a class action suit.

15> Juniper's long-time rivalry with Cisco for supremacy in the Internet core router market has been dubbed by some as the "Core Wars."

16> Today Juniper is taking yet another shot across the bow of Cisco (and HP) with its "Switch to Juniper" campaign, which is offering partners aggressive margins and discounts for its switches and switch bundles.

17> Earlier this year, Juniper stole away channel veteran Luanne Tierney from Cisco, where she worked for 15 years.

18> Tierney will take over as vice president of global partner marketing at Juniper.

19> Most recently, Juniper also poached Nawaf Bitar from Cisco. A security expert picked up in Cisco's 2007 IronPort acquisition, Bitar starts at Juniper as senior vice president and general manager of emerging technologies.

20> One of Tierney's first public moves came at the Juniper partner conference this month, with the announcement of a new co-marketing plan for its channel partners.

21> This comes on the heels of an announcement in January that the company would launch a new continuing education program for partners to further refine its Juniper Learning Academy.

22> Juniper prides itself on its clean channel dealings, touting the fact that over 96 percent of its North American enterprise business goes through distribution.

23> Last year Juniper's top partners reported double-digit growth with its networking and security product base.

24> At its partner conference in April, Juniper said it increased its market development fund spending by 20 percent in the past year.

25> Additionally, 40 percent of all MDF spending is set aside for marketing in 2011.