10-18-2017, 01:49 AM
Juniper Networks' turnaround hit a rough patch Thursday as the company pre-announced third-quarter earnings below consensus estimates, a surprise that one analyst attributed to weakness at customer Amazon.com. A rival of Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks has been seeking a turnaround under its new chief executive, Rami Rahim. It has aimed to sell more networking gear to cloud-computing providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle. Its biggest customers have been telecom companies, such as AT&T.
Juniper, in a release late Wednesday, blamed the disappointing outlook on "lower than expected revenue in our cloud vertical." Amazon Web Services is the cloud unit of e-commerce giant Amazon. "The (third-quarter) miss could suggest lumpiness at AWS, which we believe was Juniper's first 10% customer in several years," Steven Milunovich, a UBS analyst in a report. "Our industry contacts tell us AWS is changing its data center architecture; we believe this change could be creating softness in AWS spend on Juniper."
Applied Opto isn't the only optical networker getting headwinds from Amazon lately, this suggests it's more an Amazon problem than a problem specifically related to Applied Opto..