Juniper Networks CEO speaks on changing of the guard

Juniper Networks' culture won't change under new leadership -- but the girth of its channel will, outgoing CEO Scott Kriens said in an interview with SearchITChannel.com Thursday evening. That's because Juniper has Microsoft dreams -- and has recruited incoming CEO Kevin Johnson to scale up the networking company into a mega-player and make its JUNOS operating system an industry standard. It will achieve this by building a third-party developer ecosystem and leveraging the operating system to support a portfolio of hardware, applications and services. Johnson, 47, spent 16 years as president of Microsoft's platforms and services division. "Microsoft was less than $2 billion when [Johnson] joined," Kriens said, likening the earlier days at the software giant to Juniper's current $3.5 billion worth. Johnson "knows what it looks... [read full story]