Kevin Johnson who joined Juniper Networks almost three years back, is quite optimistic about the company’s performance, even in these sluggish economic conditions.  Juniper – the world’s second largest maker of Internet routers after Cisco, offers custom made gears to telcos and cable companies and the giant data centers delivering the web. But the current scenario does not appear very optimistic, as telecom spending has gone down, resulting in slow sales from 28% in 2010 to 15% this year. On the flip side, its biggest competitor Cisco also posted a good quarterly performance last week. Though this is not so good news for Juniper, the company’s CEO Kevin Johnson is still optimistic about the industry at large.

“We’re aware of the macroeconomic conditions, and customers have slowed down their capital expenditures,” says Johnson. “But there is only a certain amount of time that you can run networks hotter. There either has to be a breakthrough in technology to support the capacity growth or there has to be innovation in business models like data caps that work to throttle down usage,” he says.

Whatever the scenario is, Juniper is trying its best to accelerate innovation in networking. It has also released its much awaited switching technology, QFabric. QFabric is a family of products and services that aims to collapse the traditional three-layer datacenter network structure, which naturally got Juniper some well-earned hype when it first rolled out.  Juniper has also partnered with QLogic to bring 10G Ethernet to QFabric.

Juniper has also been actively opening up its JUNOS operating system, which runs its networking gear to third-party software developers. In addition, it has also teamed with GE. Under this collaboration, both companies will be working closely to develop a family of rugged, highly secure routing and network security appliances designed for military/aerospace deployment in harsh environments, where data security is paramount. The announcement was made at the MILCOM 2011 event held in Baltimore, Maryland, earlier this year.

Finally, Juniper is looking to expand a strategy similar to the one competitor Cisco adopted, branching out to enterprise mobile and cloud initiatives to supplement its core switching and routing business.  Interestingly, Johnson is rather excited as he revealed that the firm is considering some acquisitions in Asia this year to beef up its mobile and cloud portfolio, which we think is pretty good for the company’s future.