Though the global economy is still in recovery, 2010 was a good year for networking vendor Juniper. Juniper (NYSE:JNPR) reported its fourth quarter fiscal 2010 earnings this week, which showed overall growth for both the quarter and the year.
Juniper’s growth comes as new products were introduced during the year and as the company ramps up a new data center architecture with its Stratus effort and mobile networking with Project Falcon for 2011.
“2011 is an important next step as we prepare for the introduction of innovative new products that focus on the mobile Internet and cloud computing in unique and compelling ways for our customers,” Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson said during the company’s earnings call.
Juniper reported fourth quarter 2010 revenue of $1.19 billion, an increase of 26 percent over the fourth quarter of 2009. Juniper’s results beat the guidance provided last quarter of fourth-quarter to come in around $1.12 billion.
For the year, Juniper reported revenue of $4.09 billion which is a 23 percent increase over 2009. Net Income for the fourth quarter was reported at $190.2 million or $0.35 a share, and for the full fiscal 2010 year was reported at $628.4 million or $1.15 per share.
Moving forward Juniper provided first quarter 2011 guidance for revenue in the range of $1.06 and $1.11 billion.
The fourth quarter of 2010 was a busy one for Juniper. The company announced its new top end T4000 router which can deliver 4 Terabits per second of throughput. On the mobile side, Juniper introduced the Junos Pulse app for Apple iOS and Google Android for smartphone security.
During the quarter Juniper acquired enterprise Wi-Fi vendor Trapeze for $152 million to further expand its wireless footprint.
Continued growth for Juniper in 2011 will be fueled in part by a pair of initiatives that have been in the works for over a year. Project Falcon was first discussed in 2009 as an effort to build new wireless networking technology.
“For the past year, we’ve been building a strong and solid base with our MX 3D edge routing platform, which carries large volumes of network traffic for our service provider customers,” Johnson said. “The Falcon project delivers software that runs on the MX 3D platform and enables the evolved packet core capability to deliver services for a mobile network with scale.”
Johnson added that during the fourth quarter, Juniper delivered the first beta release of Falcon code to a major service provider customer. He noted that he expects wider deployment of Falcon during 2011.
Project Stratus on the hand is about creating a new data center fabric for cloud computing.
“Project Stratus, our data center fabric offering, will change the economics and performance of data centers with a single-tier data center fabric solution,” Johnson said. “Our growing list of design wins in the data center with EX product line for data center switching, the SRX product line for security and the MX product line for data center-to-data center connectivity are all complementary to the innovation coming from the Stratus project.”
While technology innovation continues to push Juniper forward, it’s also benefiting from a number of its strategic partners, including IBM, Dell, Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens Networks (NSN).
“On an annual basis, the revenue driven from those four partners has slightly more than doubled the growth rate of the company,” Johnson said.
Juniper also did well with Verizon during 2010. Johnson noted that sales to Verizon accounted for more than 10 percent of Juniper’s revenues for all of 2010.
“We’ve got a very broad and deep relationship with Verizon, and we’re involved in multiple projects across both wireline and wireless,” Johnson said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
