Marcel Gani wants to make Asia more intelligent

What is the background to Juniper Networks?
The company was founded in 1996 and is still relatively young. The company was founded based on the idea that there was going to be a revolution in the way information was exchanged. The characteristics of the network that would be built, we realized would be very different. In 1996 the networks were built to do multi-protocol translation, where basically an enterprise had various types of hardware in their office and they wanted them to exchange information. Routers were invented to translate this, and evolved in routing information in IP technology. But that was not their primary goal when the equipment was conceived.
So when Juniper was born we recognized that this new public network (the internet) would be based just on IP technology. We realized that it had to be like something where you are used to picking up the phone and getting a dial tone. You would want to do the same thing with that network - the way you exchanged information. You needed to know there would be something at the other end and the message would go through.
The focus from the beginning was on improving the performance of the public network. A significant amount of information had to be carried which necessitated bandwidth and we had to make the software extremely reliable.
The customer base was the service providers, the carriers who were building this new public infrastructure. We worked hand in hand with them to understand what they required. And it was pretty exciting because nothing had been built, so it was virgin territory. Our first product was the M40, which we introduced successfully at the end of 1998 and since then we have gone through a very dramatic growth.
We are based in Sunnyvale, California, but the company has a presence everywhere in the world. In Asia we are in Hong Kong, Korea, China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Sydney, and India.