Duncan said the strongest trends his company sees in these development initiatives are in the growth of service-oriented software architectures, subscription-based software sales and industry-specific standards in areas such as radio frequency tags and cellular telephony standards.

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As the networking world transitions towards flatter and more scalable software-defined architectures to better a commodate the growing need for data, Juniper is looking to embrace the trend in a way that stops its hardware business from being commoditized completely.

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As cloud-style architectures become more prevalent, we will see a parallel shift from legacy storage to modern, software-defined-storage architectures.

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Enterprises and service providers are demanding more programmability and therefore flatter networking architectures that decouple the software from the hardware so that it decreases physical complexity and allows networks to scale out through virtualization.

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Such software must attach smoothly to existing it architectures.

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This is classic disruptive innovation where low end, good enough software and systems eat away at the functionality of existing high end scale-up architectures.

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