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| December 5, 1997 |
Start-Up Juniper Gets $6 Million
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The new round of financing comes on top of $56 million already pledged by a number of large telecommunications-equipment makers and technology firms. Backers include Telefon AB LM Ericsson, Lucent Technologies Inc., Northern Telecom Ltd., 3Com Corp., Siemens AG, Newbridge Networks Corp. and WorldCom Inc.'s UUNet Technologies unit. The investors will have the opportunity to integrate Juniper's technology with their existing products.
Juniper, of Mountain View, Calif., has ambitious plans to develop key components for high-speed networking devices in a bid to challenge networking-market leader Cisco Systems Inc.
Juniper Chief Executive Officer Scott Kriens said the funding from AT&T and the Anschutz Family Investment Co. LLC is significant becaus= e it came from companies that operate networks where Juniper's products mig= ht be deployed. The Anschutz Family Investment owns a majority interest in Qwest Communications International Inc., which is building a fiber-optic network.
Juniper aims to marry advanced chip technology with a new breed of switch router -- a computer that directs data between far-flung networks = -- that can process information at rates of billions of bits per second.
Right now, the top speed of switches for the backbones of major public networks range up to about 622 million bits a second, but operators can improve potential through-put, or capacity, by linking the switches together. Juniper and several competitors are seeking speeds of 2.4 billi= on bits per second or more, and through-put rates of 60 billion bits or more. The technology is considered essential to ending bottlenecks on the Internet.
Juniper, which is $20 million and two years into its development effor= t, has shied from discussing its progress.
Last month, Juniper announced a deal with Internatio= nal Business Machines Corp. in which IBM agreed to make custom specialty chips known as ASICs, = or application specific integrated circuits, for Juniper.
Networking start-ups always face long odds, because of the expense of developing such complex products, the furious competition, and the presen= ce of Cisco, which is trying to squeeze out challengers by offering an end-to-end line of products. Cisco is testing a device that provides performance similar to the planned Juniper router.
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