News was broke by the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Juniper is announcing will begin selling new wireless products for mobile carriers, responding to bigger rival Cisco Systems recent acquisition of Starent – of which I was critical.

According to Reuters news, Juniper said on Monday its new software includes Juniper Traffic Direct which, used together with its MX 3D routers, can help mobile carriers reduce network congestion and infrastructure costs.

Another software product, Juniper Media Flow, will be targeted specifically at helping wireless carriers deliver applications like video and music, the company said, adding that they will be available from the second quarter.

Kim Perdikou, executive vice president and general manager of Juniper’s infrastructure products group, said many of the
company’s mobile carrier customers were struggling with the costs of managing wireless Internet traffic.

“As smartphones started to be implemented over the past two years…, the actual economics of how much traffic is delivered to the smartphone is beginning to break,” she said. “It’s not as though revenue is rising with the cost.”

I have call into Juniper to get more info and I will be in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress. Hope to have more of an angle by then. Right now I’m waiting for some information to come in that might make this story more interesting.

For now looks like mobile continues to be hot! Just this past weekend I wrote a story about the Mobile Meltdown. This market is so hot that I believe that we might just be heading for a meltdown.

It is expected that at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Juniper Networks will launch products that integrate mobile networks into its MX 3D Universal Edge routers and let third party vendors integrate their applications into mobile networks.

Open Is The New Black

According to Computerworld it is being reported that the Junos Space network application platform will be an open mobile core network for third-party developers and the operators themselves, so they can develop and run their own applications, The products and platform will ship next quarter.

There was some article recently that said no one can challenge Cisco. I think that fundamentally an open strategy can be a “judo like” strategy for a Juniper and others to take down Cisco. If Cisco underestimates the convergence and pushes it’s same old agenda of one vendor at all costs (when the world is going multi-vendor) then they could get tossed in key markets.

For mobile carries the question about Cisco is the conflict question as I wrote about last week. I said

Now, I’m seeing many service providers focusing on making money by delivering and monetizing user interactions (content and services). So what I’m hearing is that many service providers are saying to Cisco “Are you a content provider or a you an over the top yourself”.

Growth in Network Usage – A Tsunami of Packets

Meanwhile, Stacy Higginbotham at Gigaom posts a study that validates this growing mobile broadband market. The report was released by Cisco which puts some meat on the bone to the obvious speculation that the network is growing leaps and bounds.

The Cisco study also highlights the battle between Juniper and Cisco or for that matter Cisco verses the world.

Stacy writes:

Cisco forecasts that by 2014 we will be using 3.6 exabytes a month on mobile networks worldwide, according to its Visual Networking Index figures released today. (For those pondering an exabyte, it’s equal to 1 billion gigabytes or half a trillion MP3 files.) And by 2014, we’re apparently going to be sucking down 40 exabytes annually from our mobile broadband networks, up from a total of 1.08 exabytes in all of 2009.
Some snapshots of the study
* Global mobile data traffic has increased by 160 percent over the past year to 90 petabytes per month — the equivalent of 23 million DVDs.
* Global mobile data traffic today is growing today 2.4 times faster than global fixed broadband data traffic.
* Smartphones and laptop air cards will drive more than 90 percent of global mobile traffic by 2014.
* Of the anticipated traffic, Wi-Fi offload and other offload will only reduce mobile data use by 25 percent by 2014.
* Global mobile video traffic is forecasted to be 2.3 exabytes per month by 2014.
* By 2014, more than 400 million of the world’s Internet users will access the network solely through a mobile connection.
* Today, smartphones are only 10 percent of all handsets in use, but generate over 50 percent of global mobile data handset traffic.

It’s an exciting time for developers and anything cloud / mobile and the ability for carriers and cloud providers to deliver value in services and applications. The delivery of the applications is all about the successful and correctly deploying and aligning and assuring the availability of resources for the entire application. People have to get out of the notion of single network mindset and into the concept of an application as a network service. This is game is changing and an opportunity for upstarts to challenge the market leaders.

For an interesting take on cloud and infrastructure listen to my interview with Simon Crosby the cofounder of XenSource and not CTO of Citrix.