Nov. 7--When Kevin Johnson was hired as CEO of Juniper Networks last year, analysts said the veteran Microsoft executive could help the Sunnyvale networking equipment company find new growth and ramp up competition with the much-larger market leader, Cisco Systems. But the recession hit Silicon Valley soon after his arrival, causing Juniper's revenue and profit to plunge in the first part of 2009.

Now the company says sales are on the uptick again. Last week, Johnson and other Juniper executives flew east for what the company billed as a major event, inaugurating their listing on the New York Stock Exchange and announcing new hardware and software for an audience of tech analysts and reporters.

Johnson, who ran sales and marketing at Microsoft before he was promoted to oversee Windows software and online services, described the Juniper announcements as a "stake in the ground for our vision for the next decade." Tech experts said the rhetoric might be a bit inflated, but the new products represent solid advances that could help Juniper grow beyond its core market of networking equipment for telecommunications service providers and expand its toehold in corporate data centers.

The Mercury News spoke with Johnson this week. The following has been edited for space and clarity.

Q When you took the CEO job, some analysts said Juniper was focused on engineering but needed to step up its marketing and sales efforts. Do you

agree, and are you doing that?

A It's fair to say that Juniper Networks, in the area of high-performance networking, has some of the most phenomenal technology on the planet. It's also fair to say that in many cases customers weren't aware of that, so the opportunity is not only to continue investing in innovation but to raise awareness and tell our story. And we see a tremendous opportunity, not just with a set of new products and technology that we're taking to market, but with a fundamental new approach to networking.

Q I can understand the importance of faster chips and networking hardware, which you introduced last week. You're also expanding your software platform for outside developers so they can write a variety of programs that will be compatible with Juniper's hardware and your Junos operating system. Why do that?

A If you look over the last decade, the networking industry has been (segmented among) different special-purpose uses, different operating systems. That pushes the complexity to the customer and increases their costs. So the approach we're taking is different.