I have this recurring nightmare that Juniper’s CEO short list is made up of Mark Hurd, Carly Fiorina, Leo Apotheker, and Steve Ballmer. But I have faith Juniper’s board is smarter than HP or Microsoft’s. Admittedly a low bar. The name that should be at the top of that list is Alcatel’s Basil Alwan. Why?
- He’s a brilliant manager: Anyone who can keep his team together in the belly of the shambolic beast that is Alcatel MUST be a genius manager. QED.
- He Prioritizes Performance Over Politics: Basil has survived and thrived at Alcatel without ever getting too deep into the byzantine politics of Paris. That would be a welcome focus at Juniper- where a crop of ex-Microsofties seem to have brought over their associated focus on backstabbing and nest-feathering over actually selling things to paying customers.
- He understands the product: Carrier routing is a big-iron, high performance, low-volume business. You can’t approach it as just selling a particularly expensive widget. There aren’t a lot of senior tech executives left out there who really “get” this sort of low-unit-sales-high-dollar business model.
- He understands the product that makes the money: Juniper has wasted too many cycles and too much shareholder dilution chasing the Enterprise will-o-the-wisp. There is a business there for them (more on this later), but there is (or would have been) a lot more, healthier business for them in the carrier space. The carrier business is always going to be hard work, but it is where Juniper has its most defensible positioning and it’d be great to have a CEO who embraced that reality rather than chasing a dream.
- Wall Street likes him and will give him the benefit of the doubt: Juniper’s stock chart makes it clear there is a whole lot more doubt than benefit baked into current expectations. Basil is a genuinely nice guy, suffers fools with great patience, and has a long-standing relationship with everyone who is anyone in the networking investment community. Juniper could use some of his credibility.
- He runs a lean shop. Visits to Basil’s HQ always made that clear. Juniper’s pathetic operating margins over the last few years are crying out for a tighter grip on the purse (see “ex-Microsofties” above).
I hasten to add that I haven’t spoken to Basil in a few years and haven’t run this by him or anyone else. Beyond my owning a large chunk of JNPR stock, I have no dog in this hunt.
