This article is more than 1 year old

Juniper warns of bitter 3rd quarter due to cloud sales crash

The cloud market's going nuts and Juniper rode it in Q1 and Q2. So what's wrong now?

Juniper Networks has issued preliminary results for its third quarter and the news is bad: forecast revenue of between US$1,290m and $1,350m won't happen and the company instead believes it will score between $1,250m and $1,260m.

We'll know just how badly the company has missed its targets and why on October 24th, the date of its next earnings call.

For now the only explanation for the miss is a statement that says it's “primarily due to lower than expected revenue in our cloud vertical.”

Learning what went wrong will be fascinating as in its Q1 2017 results announcement Juniper said it was chuffed with growth in cloudy sales. Especially switch sales to large customers like cloud operators. It said more or less the same in its Q2 2017 results, which again featured strong cloud sales and gave no hint of future problems.

Nor is the wider cloud market is tanking: analyst firm IDC last week reported that in Q2 2017 that public cloud infrastructure revenue grew 34.1 per cent year over year in Q2 and private cloud spend jumped 9.9 per cent. The firm forecast more growth too.

It's possible that Juniper's warning reflects just one whale of a deal going south. Markets seem to think it's a deeper problem, dropping Juniper's share price by over five per cent for the day once news of the preliminary results landed. ®

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