KEY POINTS:
Internet equipment-maker Juniper Networks has had a strong year, thanks to growing demand for network technology. The company reported global sales were up 29 per cent in the past quarter, compared with the same period last year.
Several New Zealand internet service providers have bought equipment from Juniper this year as the competitive local ISP market encouraged operators to upgrade their networks.
Simon Hendery asked Juniper's Asia Pacific vice-president, Adam Judd, how the global economic meltdown would affect business and how ISPs were adapting.
Your larger competitor, Cisco Systems, has warned the markets its revenue and profit will fall as a result of the international economic downturn. Is Juniper in a similar situation?
We're in a unique position. In the service-provider market we're benefiting from a huge build-out of broadband infrastructure. And that continues unabated as far as we can see.
[In the Asia Pacific region] Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo, China Telecom and Korea Telecom are all building large broadband networks and that's feeding a community which is fairly buoyant even in a down market. Whether it's broadband or TV services, there are a whole variety of online services which people are now buying. The demand for bandwidth continues to increase.
With ISPs offering more "multi-play" services - bundled packages including broadband, internet TV and phone services - what specific services will be most popular next year?
I live in Hong Kong which is probably the most successful multi-play [market] particularly around IPTV [internet TV]. They almost have a million users now running on Juniper infrastructure.
To give you an example, I'm a user of Now [a service from Hong Kong telco PCCW which offers], almost 200 channels, about 40 of those are high definition. Beyond the programming is the ability to go shopping, to book cinema tickets, to buy phone services - all of it linked centrally back to your TV and on to a central bill. It's extremely powerful and the key to it is providing an intelligent infrastructure that allows them the flexibility to give their marketing team the creativity to develop those services.
Although there may not be what you'd call a "killer application" out there, what PCCW are finding are a number of localised niche applications which are really starting to make a difference and add incremental revenue from every single user on the network. and that's really been the key here. Under the new Government, New Zealand looks set to follow Australia and Singapore down the "National Broadband Network" path.
What are the implications of the NBN approach?
NBNs provide a high-speed, intelligent infrastructure which is allowing content providers the infrastructure to go and develop new services, and that's a good thing. How that plays itself out in New Zealand, I need to learn a bit more before I give you my opinion.
Video is changing all of the services in the markets we're seeing today. The demand for video is going to continue.
What's important is the service into the house and your ability to be able to derive a huge number of services from that, depending on your lifestyle.
