BANGKOK, THAILAND: In the summer of 1996, Juniper CTO and founder Pradeep Sindhu started a journey into a completely uncharted territory. An approach never tried and a concept never tested. A single-operating-system approach to high-performance networking, as against culling out separate operating system for every routing, switching and other application-specific platforms that was being introduced.
 
Running against the tide of producing a new operating system for each product line, which his competition was doing and was quite successful at that, Sindhu and his core group on engineers at Juniper, forayed the other way round---focused and concentrated on a single operating system (OS) for every product.
 
Twelve years down the line, with religious adherence to key policies, viz., single release, single code, and consistent architecture, the single-operating-system, later christened by the company as JUNOS or Juniper Operating  System has helped Juniper to make a marginal gains in the router space.
 
Juniper today has 5 percent of the $4.2 billion enterprise-router market, 18 percent of the $4.7 billion service-provider edge-router market and 30 percent of the $2.7 billion service-provider core-router market, according to the Dell'Oro Group.  The market is led by Cisco which has 82 percent, 54 percent and 55 percent shares, respectively.
 
Matt Kolon, CTO, Juniper Asia Pacific, explains the idea that went behind this JUNOS.  He said: "When we at Juniper thought about JUNOS, we were clear from the beginning. The core group who worked for JUNOS had worked for years on other operating systems and didn't want to make mistakes that rivals companies had done in the enterprise service provider space."

"From our experience customers found it difficult to work around multiple operating systems. Figuring out what release of the operating system works with which particular product and products was a huge challenge for them", adds Kolon.

Kolon adds that idea of consistent single operating system and a single unified architecture was done essentially to solve difficult problems once rather than solving them over and over again and help  customer's standpoint products appear to be consistent so they are a lot easier to use.

"JUNOS has a dedicated resources for control and packet forwarding – providing predictable performance as new services are activated and with a command-line interface (CLI) that doesn't lock-up. The operating system has features - preserve forwarding and control operations during device events with non-stop forwarding, Graceful Routing Engine Switchover (GRES), non-stop active routing, chassis clustering, etc" adds Kolon.