Juniper Looks to Increase Asian Presence

Juniper Networks is ready to do some holiday shopping despite its net income dropping 38% in the third quarter over the same period a year ago. CEO Kevin Johnson attended a research conference in Hong Kong on Monday where he told a reporter, "If there are interesting opportunities that have strategic alignment with what we are doing and make economic sense, we're very open to M&A [mergers and acquisitions] and companies in Asia."

What he said in Juniper's conference call last week

Echoing what he said in Juniper's conference call last week, Johnson added that he is very interested in companies that can enhance Juniper's broader market possibility in "... the two key trends of mobile Internet and cloud computing."

Johnson pointed out that with Asia contributing one-fifth of Juniper's earnings, that market is becoming more critical to the company's potential. "We continue to see Asia growing faster than other regions," he said.

Juniper knows it can't stand however in the highly competitive network infrastructure marketplace. Its biggest rival is Cisco , which is pounding away at it in the hotly contested data-center fabric market. Other competitors for this market are Brocade , and Hewlett-Packard .

Juniper is as well competing against Alcatel-Lucent and ADTRAN -- as then as Cisco and HP -- for sales of traditional network switching and routing hardware, and the systems which manage them, to telecoms and other service providers.