For a long time now,
Juniper has had one big ol' customer floating its bottom line:
Google. It makes sense, as Juniper specializes in gigantically powerful boxes for routing traffic, and Google exists as one giant pool of information in a constant state of flux. Both incoming and outgoing, it's hard to imagine a world where Google isn't the absolute largest generator of traffic on the Internet, no matter what all the monitoring agencies say.
But all of that is going to change soon. According to multiple sources, including one inside
Cisco,
Google is working on its own router.
Yep, you read that right. It would seem that Google is fed up with JUNOS and all the various difficulties it can present in an environment where, frankly, no one has figured out the best practices. In a world where traffic is likely doubling every six months, it's hard to think of any type of hardware architecture that could possibly sustain itself. It would seem that Juniper hasn't figured this out either, and Google has taken it upon itself to chase down a solution of its own.
So, if any of you out there own Juniper stock, now would be the time to rethink your ownership, before the rest of the world wakes up and realizes that the company's biggest cash cow is about to be sacrificed at the altar of doing it one's self.