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Juniper Networks (JNPR) chief executive Rami Rahim was kind enough to talk to me this evening by telephone following his company's better-than-expected Q3 report and above-consensus Q4 revenue view, which drove the stock up by $1.87, or almost 8%, to $25.59, in late trading.

Rahim is coming up on his two-year mark as CEO next month, and January will be his 20th anniversary with the company. Rahim, who was employee number 32, joined a little bit after the company was set up by prior CEO, and current chairman, Scott Kriens, and by Pradeep Sindhu, who remains Juniper's CTO.

He spent most of the last two decades in engineering, "developing product," he says, culminating with the "MX" router, Juniper's most successful product line ever.

Did he ever think he'd be running the show, with Sindhu reporting to him. "Absolutely not, I certainly had ambition, I certainly wanted to see my responsibilities grow in the company, and I was very glad to have the opportunity to learn from what is an incredibly talented team, but I never expected I would get to the top job. I'm loving every minute of it!"

I asked how Juniper's role has changed since the late '90s, when the goal seemed to be mainly to take down Cisco Systems (CSCO):

I think our role back then was to be a challenger in an industry that needed challenging. Today, I think that’s how we need to operate and innovate. The problem set has evolved a little bit. In past it was about the explosion in broadband access, always-on internet connections to people around the world. Today, what’s driving a lot of it is the cloud. This cloud transformation. That’s where the opportunity is. For us, specifically, as these workloads move to the data centers, you need to have large pipes between the consumers and providers of cloud. That’s a fantastic opportunity for us. The switching problem is essentially a high-performance switching problem. You see that our QFX [switch] grew 50%, year over year.

How does he expect to beat Cisco, and more so Arista Networks (ANET), which created this new market of data center switching, in a sense? Layer 3 routing, which involves more information about route topology, is an area where Juniper can bring experience to bear, he tells me:

This opportunity within the data center is one that is competitive, certainly, with Arista and Cisco, and we have come in just recently with something that outperforms them in scaling and in Layer 3 performance. The data center problem has essentially become a high performance Layer 3 networking problem. That is right up our sleeves, in terms of what Juniper excels at. We excel at large scale problems. The challenges in terms of the numbers of servers you can attach, the number of mac addresses you serve, the number of IP routes you can connect. The scale of our equipment is above and beyond what anyone else has out there. Because these networks have become Layer 3 in nature, Juniper has an opportunity to take our years of experience in Layer 3 routing and apply that in a way no one else can. When the data center was relatively small, you could solve it with Layer 2. As a result of the cloud transformation, you must move to Layer 3. That moves everything closer to our core competence. The QFX not only has the scale that’s required, it's basically Layer 3 routing in a package.

How is this different from the "Layer 3 switching" revolution that happened in enterprise networking back in the 1990s, I asked.

If you look at the history of our industry, there have been several inflection points that Juniper has taken advantage of. The first was this universal agreement of what the routing protocols are going to be used to run the internet. It all became TCP-IP. We bet the entire company on that happening, and we were fortunate to have gotten that right. Then this movement away from several legacy telecom interfaces, from SONET and SDH, toward carrier ethernet. That’s an inflection we leveraged very successfully to build the MX, which is our most successful product line ever, and the last product where I really got my hands dirty developing before I moved to the business side of things. There is a similar sort of inflection now going on for routing in large-scale cloud data centers. It's a totally different part of the overall network landscape, but it's similar in that it applies Layer 3 routing to high-performance networking in ways not many players can solve.

But, I asked, can't one just buy a Broadcom (AVGO) chip and do Layer 3? No, he says, it's an art:

Layer 3 routing is as much an art as a science, because there are some really tricky things to get right. You can count the number of tech players in the world that actually have the ability to participate in the higher-performance problems in data center or wide area. The software that’s required, in particular, is complex, and there is some real expertise and some very specialized technical talent involved to actually solve these kinds of problems. Juniper is one of the small club of companies that can do this.

How's the market doing overall?

I'm really pleased with our performance, and how we are executing. We had good revenue growth, 3% year over year, and good sequential growth, with 8% growth in routing, 6% in switching, and 9% in security. Some of the macro issues we saw in the first part of the year are starting to resolve themselves. We are seeing good momentum through the end of this year. Our competitive situation with new products, especially in routing and switching, is giving us a real competitive edge in an opportunity that’s definitely out there in the cloud.

So this data center thing is just getting going, it sounds like. Yes, as far as he's concerned, there's a lot to be done:

Most people when they think of cloud think data center. Fact of the matter is, cloud and cloud services can only be successful if network that connects those to consumers is capable of delivering the experience end users require. Example in consumer space: if it wasn’t for the wide area network essentially run by high scale routers and the home, we would still be watching videos by putting these funny silver disks in DVD players. That doesn’t happen because you have streaming data services from cloud data centers over a high performance network that we must ensure continue to scale.

He expects to take share from Cisco and Arista in areas of higher-speed switching, something Juniper has "an ability" to do:

Data center switching is growing at a good clip, roughly 10% year over year. We intend to participate in the growth of that market. Our goal in data center switching, and wide area routing, our goal is to take share. If you look at our performance in switching over the last couple years, we are demonstrating we have an ability to take share. I think in switching we have tremendous focus, in the high-performance switching space, the part of the market that's over 10 gigs [per second], the 40 gig and 100 gig market. We have consistently taken share over the last couple of years. Although the reports for Q3 are not yet out, you’ll see that Juniper has continued that trend.