History
In 1995 Pradeep Sindhu, a principal scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, returned from vacation with the idea to start a company to supply high-performance routers to support the quickly emerging Internet. Sindhu started the company in February 1996 with $200,000 in seed money from powerful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the deal led by Vinod Khosla. He hired two other engineers, Bjorn Liencres from Sun Microsystems and Dennis Ferguson from MCI. For business expertise, Sindhu recruited Scott Kriens, co-founder of StrataCom.
As a startup, Juniper received $6 Million in funding from AT&T Corporation and the Anschutz Corporation in 1997. It also received another $14 million from a variety of venture capitalists. It garnered financial support of over $40 million of Northern Telecom, 3Com, UUNET Technologies, a subsidiary of WorldCom, the Siemens AG/Newbridge Networks alliance; and Ericsson.
Juniper went public on 25 June 1999. The price per share was US$34.00, and 4.8 million shares were offered on the Nasdaq National Market under the trading symbol JNPR. The company had one of the most successful initial public offerings in history. By the end of the first day as a publicly traded company, Juniper's stock rose to $98.88, a 190 percent single-day jump that increased the company's market capitalization to just below $4.9 billion, the highest ever first-day valuation for a technology company, according to Securities Data Corp.
Pradeep Sindhu served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors until September 1996. Kriens became CEO in October 1996, and is credited with leading Juniper's initial commercial success. Juniper was reincorporated in March 1998 in Delaware. After being highly visible in 1999-2003 timeframe, Kriens became largely inactive for several years between 2004 and 2007 until eventually stepping down in 2008. Scott remained as Chairman with annual compensation totaling $3,958,110.00 in 2008.
Kevin Johnson succeeded Kriens as Juniper's third CEO in July 2008; Johnson was the former chief of Microsoft's Platform and Services Division. Johnson had to immediately deal with the effects of the global economy recession, but decided against cuts to Juniper's $800 million R&D budget. Company stayed on "fast" R&D track, entering two new packet markets (mobile and datacenter) in the next three years.
Read more about this topic: Juniper Networks
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