Focusing on strategic, high-growth opportunities, Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced a new, integrated operating plan (IOP), which will refocus the company on innovation for service providers and enterprises where demand for High-IQ Networks and best-in-class cloud environments are driving growth.
During its fourth quarter and fiscal 2013 financial results call, the company said it conducted a comprehensive and ongoing review of business and customer needs to provide a more focused R&D and go-to-market program.
"The cornerstone of our IOP is the belief that our customers, which include some of the world's largest service providers, financial services companies and government agencies, are increasingly building hyper-scale, resilient, secure, highly intelligent, open and virtualized networks," stated Shaygan Kheradpir, chief executive officer of Juniper Networks. "As a pure-play, high-performance networking company with engineering and organic innovation at its core, I believe Juniper is uniquely positioned to help these customers address their rapidly evolving networking needs. Our new, sharpened focus will bring us closer to our customers as we innovate together to address the opportunities ahead, and will enable us to operate much more efficiently as One-Juniper."
"One Juniper" Structure Unveiled
The IOP strategy will capitalize on Juniper's engineering expertise across routing, switching, security, control and network management - focusing on network segments driven by service provider, enterprise and government customers. It will create an optimized One-Juniper structure - a more focused, connected, agile and execution-oriented company structure driven to deliver on its customers' imperatives for High-IQ Networks and cloud environments. The optimized One-Juniper structure will focus on quality, depth and will augment its approach with an outside-in customer imperative fused with inside-out innovation. The company also committed to return a minimum of $3 billion to shareholders over the next three years through a combination of share repurchases and dividends.
Kheradpir noted, "Our new integrated operating plan combines Juniper's heritage of innovation with an outside-in customer imperative, ensuring that we are best positioned to meet customer demands for integrated and use-case driven technology solutions."
In developing the IOP, Juniper considered the views of its stakeholders, and engaged in constructive discussions with shareholders including Elliott Management. Juniper has reached an agreement with Elliott whereby Elliott has agreed among various customary terms, to support the Company's changes announced and to vote in favor of Juniper's nominees at its 2014 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
"Today's announcement is an incredibly positive development for Juniper and its shareholders," stated Jesse Cohn, portfolio manager at Elliott Management. "Shaygan and his team have developed a thoughtful and highly value-accretive plan to invest for growth, significantly streamline and target the operations, and meaningfully return capital to shareholders. Further, Shaygan and the Board, which will be adding two leading operations-focused executives, have impressed us with a focused commitment to accountability and execution of the plan. Elliott is highly optimistic about the Company's future and looks forward to supporting Juniper in its continued focus on creating shareholder value."
