He is a neo-traditionalist in the true sense of the word. Staying focused, respecting the abilities of others, taking lessons out of history…what else do you call a man who actually talks about these philosophies seriously in the days of the Internet?

Yet, he is someone who has built a company that has created stock market history and, more importantly, has made the most aggressive technology company in history, go defensive.

Scott Kriens, CEO of Juniper Networks, shares his thoughts with Voice&Data. Thoughts that are old, or should we say ancient, and yet so fresh.

How do you succeed?

We have a very specific and consistent practice. We focus, we execute, we learn and we repeat. We focus on our customers. We execute as the customers direct us. We learn a tremendous amount when we do that. Then we repeat it by putting it back into other products.

We are in a marketplace where the challenge is to connect more than a billion users together in the next couple of years. That presents unique problems that no one has ever solved. And solving those problems has created the opportunity for us. That is not found everyday. That is not something that every company has the opportunity to do.

If the problem you are solving is truly unique, and if it has never been solved, then the company that is built from scratch to solve it, has got a very good chance of succeeding. We have complete focus, in this case, on solving a very difficult problem.

But still, it is very difficult to understand what reports after reports say—the way you gain market share in short periods of time—about seven to eight percentage points in each quarter. That too, when your competitor is Cisco, a company that is believed to do all the right things at the right time. What I mean is that there must be some practical reasons apart from the core philosophy that you believe in.

Often, when people talk to me about Juniper, there is a search for some magic or secret. And the secret is…there is no secret. It is the fundamentals.

And having said that let me tell you that we are watching the market grow very, very quickly. So, the percentage of market share any company has at any point of time is very, very subjective. A better way to look at things is to draw a line taking three to four quarters. Some dots will be above the line and some will be below.

We actually measure our performance in absolute dollar terms, not by market share. Neither do we determine our success or failure by the market share that we have at any point of time.

That is probably because you have been the new kid so far. Growth has been more important than market share to you. But with new companies like Avici entering and challenging you, will you still look at things in the same way?

The size of the market that we are in was zero just three years ago. In the next two years, estimates are that it will become of the order of $12-15 billion. And when the opportunity is of that magnitude, it certainly attracts a lot of players. At the end of the day though, if history is any teacher, there are going to be just two successful companies in each segment. I don’t mean to say that it is the current two players, it maybe two different ones.

Because customers bet their networking systems on a product, you add a second product and the complexity of using the two of them goes up. And when that happens, the reliability goes down. Maintaining it becomes harder. When you add the third, it becomes harder yet again. If the value to the network operator is not substantially improved, it just becomes more complicated. Still, adding a second one makes more sense because there is diversity and choice.

So, any company that comes after this market, whether large or small, will have to occupy one of the top two positions. We are in a position to be one of the two companies.

A great company is more than just a market leader. And for growing rapidly, it is difficult to do that, along with staying so focused...

The evidence on the table thus far—i.e. over nine quarters of existence—proves that we are a revenue producing company. And focus has produced the fastest growing companies in history, measured by pure results, quarter after quarter. Any great company that I can think of has grown by innovation—by developing products, inventing value and delivering it to customers. And that is the model we intend to follow. Look at the great companies—Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun—all these companies grew because they invented technology and delivered it to the market by staying focused. We are completely comfortable with our strategy of producing a growth model that will meet the market requirements. I have absolutely no concerns about focus being able to produce rapid growth.

People still think your focus is the product that you grew with—the core routers… How do you define your focus?

The market that we are in is building and delivering the intelligence that delivers information. There is a transport market, which sets up capacity for packets to move in. Then there is an information delivery market, which concerns itself with where the packet comes from, where it will go and who needs to know what for the purpose of billing. We also call it packet processing or address processing. Then there is a third market which takes the data out of the packet and concerns itself with how it is used—that is the application market. So, broadly, there are these three markets—transport, processing and application. The market that we are in is processing. That is our focus.