Juniper Senior Vice President Strategy and Marketing, Michael Marcellin:

The networking industry is going through a fundamental technology change driven by the need to simplify network operations.

Juniper has been building for this shift for over 5 years and we're excited about the opportunity it brings us to challenge the data center switching old guard.

Juniper Networks' strategy has always been built on challenging that status quo and we have embraced the rise of software in networking.

That is why Juniper is focused on innovation that matters most to our customers: hyper-scale, resilient, secure, highly intelligent, open and virtualized networks, which is reflected in strong customer adoption of Juniper's MetaFabric architecture over the last two quarters.

Cisco Director of Corporate Communications, John Earnhardt:

It is our belief that the open source switch market, sometimes called the "white box" market, is largely only attractive to a small, highly-resourced subset of the overall I.T. market. That's because the approach is loaded with hidden hard and operational costs.

For example, networking capital equipment outlays typically constitute only 30% of the cost of running networks. Labor costs constitute 50%, and will increase with the white box approach as IT departments are required to install, integrate and update separate network operating systems and network virtualization software.

The largest hidden cost comes from network virtualization software licenses. VMware NSX, for example, charges a per-virtual-machine licensing fee ranging from $10-$50 per month. The combined cost of increased labor, network operating systems licenses, and per port "VM tax" leads white box networking costs to be 75% higher than for Cisco networks.

While the open source switch approach is definitely not for everyone, I want to be very clear that we know this segment of the market (largest Internet players) very well, and we intend to retain and grow these customers by addressing their needs for more programmable infrastructure with our Application Centric Infrastructure strategy. For example, 7 of the 10 largest Internet companies in the world are Cisco customers. In the US, 9 of the top 10 largest Massively Scalable Data Centers (MSDCs) are Cisco customers.

Enterprise and Commercial markets requirements are more diverse than massively scalable data centers (MSDC) and support heterogeneous applications (physical and virtual), across unique operational tool sets and a lot of the operational models differ within their Cloud environments.