Juniper Networks
More info
- Creator
- Pradeep Sindhu
- Released
- 1996–
- Owner
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (since 2025)
- Type
- Network equipment
The one router maker that ever seriously challenged Cisco in the internet backbone.
Pradeep Sindhu founded Juniper in 1996 on a simple premise: ISP traffic was growing faster than routers built on general-purpose CPUs could keep up with. Its first product, the M40 of 1998, forwarded packets in custom silicon and ran Junos, an operating system built on FreeBSD. Ever since, Juniper and Cisco have split the market for big carrier routers speaking BGP and MPLS.
Its darkest chapter came in 2015, when it emerged that someone had slipped unauthorised code into the ScreenOS firewall operating system. The backdoor made it possible to decrypt VPN traffic, partly via the notorious Dual_EC random number generator. In 2025 Juniper was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.