Juniper Networks Expands into Asia to Tap Fast Expanding Internet Backbone Market

Juniper Networks Expands into Asia to Tap Fast Expanding Internet Backbone Market

Mountain View, CA - November 11, 1999 — Juniper Networks, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance Internet equipment, today announced its expansion into Asia with the opening of its new regional headquarters in Hong Kong and the availability of its next-generation Internet routers targeted to handle the fast expanding capacity needs of the Internet backbone.

The Silicon Valley firm, recently listed on Nasdaq (ticker: JNPR) in one of the most successful Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) ever, has seen its market capitalization climb to more than US$10 billion. The company's main product is the M40 Internet backbone router, which combines high-performance hardware and sophisticated software to deliver Net-based traffic to its destination up to ten times quicker than current products.

"Juniper Networks was established to meet the critical networking needs of telcos and Internet service providers, owners and operators of the core backbones over which much of the world's Internet traffic passes," said Steven Haley, Juniper Networks Vice President of Sales and Service. "Juniper's products are purpose-built to address this highly defined market, one which is expected to grow significantly over the next five years."

According to US market analysts Ryan, Hankin, and Kent, the worldwide market for Internet backbone routers is expected to be around US$500M in 1999, growing to around US$8 billion by 2003.

Established in Mountain View, California in February 1996, Juniper Networks has drawn a roster of all-star talent from a number of competing companies to design and develop a series of high performance products customized for the Internet. The firm attracted US$90 million in funding from venture capital firms, with a number of leading industry players taking equity stakes. Juniper Networks clients include the world's largest and fastest growing networks such as Cable & Wireless, the UUNET division of MCI Worldcom, Frontier Global Center, and Verio Inc.

Expanding rapidly outside of its North America home market, Juniper Networks established its European headquarters in the UK in March this year, followed two months later by an office in the Japan, serving the second largest networking market worldwide. The firm's Asia Pacific operations in Hong Kong will form the next step in its worldwide growth, adding to one of the fastest global expansions to date of any networking concern.

With the opening of the new Asia Pacific office, Juniper Networks products will be available in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, together with Australia and New Zealand. The company expects to open an office in Beijing in the near future.

"We see a significant opportunity for Juniper Networks products in the Asia Pacific region, particularly in China where demand for backbone routers continues to expand," said Charles Will, Juniper's Managing Director Asia Pacific and Latin American Operations."All across the region the rapid deployment of core optical trunks, STM-1/OC-3 [155 Megabit per second] and above, is driving up the need for high bandwidth handling routers such as Juniper Networks."

Mr. Haley said that two factors were underpinning Juniper Networks strategy in addressing the Internet backbone market. Firstly, service providers require more bandwidth and speedier equipment to keep up with the explosion of the Net and the demands it has placed on their infrastructure. Secondly, these same companies need more sophisticated methods to allocate bandwidth and provision services so they can, in turn, differentiate themselves to customers in a crowded market for data and voice-based network connections.

The Juniper Networks M40 Internet backbone router is designed specifically for the specialized needs of high-growth Internet backbone providers. It is the first router capable of forwarding data at rates of 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) and conducting packet look-ups at 40 million packets per second— enabling Internet providers to grow their backbones to STM-16/OC-48 speeds (2.488-Gbps).

The M40 recently won a tester choice from Data Communications magazine, with its performance being identified as exemplary. The same magazine named the M40 router as hot product of the month in January of this year.

Lying at the core of the M40 router is a powerful Packet Forwarding Engine (PFE) driven by state-of-the-art ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) manufactured by IBM. Featuring a single, shared memory system, the PFE has one forwarding table, one look-up, one packet write, and one packet read. The ASIC-based PFE architecture allows ISPs to provide key, differentiated service creation features through CoS (Class-of-Service), multicast, and traffic engineering. The highly integrated ASIC design ensures minimum space and power consumption.

For maximum Internet control and reliability, the M40 router features JUNOS Internet software, the first and only routing operating system designed for Internet-scale control. JUNOS software offers a complete set of Internet-tested, Internet-scale and standards-compliant routing protocols for optimal management of network growth and operations.

"JUNOS software ushers in a new level of network control and efficiency through the industry's first implementation on an Internet backbone class router of the emerging Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) traffic engineering standard," said Mr. Will." It gives service providers a solid framework for adding new and differentiated services to their backbone offering."

The Juniper M40 Internet backbone router chassis contains 8 FPC slots that can accommodate up to 32 Physical Interface Cards, which range from 45-Mbps, STM-1, STM-4 and STM-16 for SDH, STM-1 and STM-4 for ATM, and Gigabit Ethernet.

"With the delivery of the M40 Internet backbone router and JUNOS Internet software, Juniper Networks has established a solid foundation for the future growth of the Internet, one that will embrace a new level of performance and control for service providers' evolving public data networks," said Mr. Haley.

About Juniper Networks, Inc.

Juniper Networks, Inc., is a leading provider of next-generation Internet infrastructure systems that are designed to meet the scalability, performance, density, and compatibility requirements of rapidly evolving, optically-enabled IP networks. The company's purpose-built M40 Internet backbone router uses JUNOS software, ASICs, and wire-rate performance to provide new Internet infrastructure solutions for service providers. The M40 router is used by some of the world's leading service providers.

Juniper Networks service, manufacturing teams, and Internet engineers support the M40 router. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California*, with international offices in London, UK, Tokyo, Japan and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. For more information on Juniper Networks, please contact the company at 408-745-2000 or visit the Web site at http://www.juniper.net.

Juniper Networks is a registered trademark of Juniper Networks, Inc. JUNOS and M40 are trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks may be the property of their respective owners.