Six major communications companies, usually fierce rivals, have joined together and invested $40m in a one year-old start-up that says it has the technology to boost routing speeds up to 100 times faster than the speediest units currently available. Mountain View, California start-up, Juniper Networks Inc, says it is developing a next generation router that through a combination of its own chip set design and software will deliver IP data traffic at speeds of 2.4 billion bits per second or more. The six new companies taking a combined 24% equity stake in the company are Telefon AB LB Ericsson, Northern Telecom Ltd, the Siemens AG and Newbridge Networks Inc unit ATM Alliance, 3Com Corp, Worldcom/UUNet Technologies Inc and Lucent Technologies Inc. According to Juniper, it sought out the companies as resources it needed including a way into to the telecoms equipment market where only a handful of suppliers are trusted by carriers. Because of the competitive nature of the investing vendors, Juniper says that each will be dealt with separately by the start-up. The combination of Juniper’s ASIC and internet software expertise as well as the pedigree of its founders looks to have impressed the new investors. The three founders were Pradeep Sindhu from Xerox PARC and Sun Microsystems Inc, Dennis Ferguson, the internet expert for MCI Corp who developed NSFNet, and Bjorn Liencres who was an architect of on Sunn’s Ultra enterprise servers. Juniper is tight lipped about exactly what technology it is developing, but says will be announcing a product in the fourth quarter this year. According to Juniper CEO Scott Kierns, the company will produce a complete system including its own chip design as well as routing software capable of connecting to existing hardware on the internet as well as speeding up policy management. Although the company is targeting its technology at IP networks, Kierns says, the company’s technology could be used for other protocols including Asynchronous Transfer Mode. The company says it will license its technology to its new investors as well as sell its own complete router products directly to the ISP market, says Kierns. The company insists its designs are creating a new market but it is clearly looking to eat into Cisco Systems Inc’s domination of the internet router market. Cisco’s current efforts revolve around its Gigabit Switch Router, the first generation of which it previewed earlier this year (CI No 3,008). However, new investor 3Com says that it believes Juniper is two to three generations of technology ahead of Cisco. Licensing such a technology could give 3Com, currently number two in the network market behind Cisco, a valuable advantage in the high-end router market. The new investors make up Juniper’s third round of financing. In two previous rounds, the last completed in September 1996, the company raised $16m from a number of venture capital firms.
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