Scott Kriens
Published for the Week Of November 15, 2004
Eighteen years ago, as part of A team of entrepreneurs that founded networking upstart StrataCom, Scott Kriens sat among a clutter of unopened cartons at a desk that he hadn’t bothered to budge from the spot where movers had plunked it down three weeks earlier.
While his counterpart in charge of Eastern U.S. sales had settled into his office quickly, positioning the new furniture just so, Kriens was too busy drumming up business in the Western United States, recalls Bill Stensrud, a StrataCom founder and now general partner at Enterprise Partners Venture Capital.
“Scott hadn’t unpacked any boxes, but he was on the phone and he had gotten orders,” he says. “He has this ability to prioritize and get things accomplished.”
That’s why Stensrud, also a director for Juniper Networks, Sunnyvale, Calif., had no qualms about recommending Kriens when Juniper was searching for a chairman and CEO in 1996 to move the company from its startup stage. Kriens, who had left StrataCom just before its acquisition by Cisco Systems, was willing and available.
Since then, Kriens’ priority has been building Juniper into a formidable player in the service provider router market, where it has been taking share away from market leader Cisco. Juniper’s revenue grew 83 percent to $905 million over the first three quarters of this year.
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Now Kriens, 47, is going after Cisco in the enterprise market. He bought NetScreen Technologies for $4 billion, introduced a new family of enterprise access routers and hired former Cisco executive Tushar Kothari to run Juniper’s new channel program. “The question we ask is: ‘How will our partners make money?’ and I think that’s the exact opposite approach that is often brought to the marketplace,” Kriens says.
Luis Laranjeira, vice president of business development at SMS Data Products Group, a solution provider in McLean, Va., says Juniper has solid products and offers high margins. “Over the next two to three years, I believe Cisco is going to have a heck of a hard time competing with Juniper,” he says. “I see them as the next Cisco.”