Those of us who follow the telecom industry have no doubt heard the rumor that Google is going to build its own routers. It was first reported in the SD Times who quoted a "super-secret" source. Super-secret in this case is almost redundant; everything inside Google is super-secret. But this isn't the first time one of the Google employees has leaked a tidbit about the operation, nor is it the first time Google has struck out on its own:
I especially like that last one.
I've spent very little time in and around Google, but it's obvious, even to me, that Google has both the money and the intellectual horsepower to pull something like this off. Walking around their campus and looking at the nameplates on the doors is like a trip to your favorite tech bookstore, only it's not the books that are on display behind the glass-lined offices, it's the authors themselves. Can Google build a router, you bet.
So, I may not know what goes on behind the doors at Google but I've been closely involved with router companies, close enough to know goes into building a high-end edge router:
The right people
$30-$50 million dollars
12-18 months
Put these three things together with motivation (a winning idea, or a networking problem only Google could have) and just about anything is possible.
For Google, $30-$50 million isn't really all that much money. Even so, we might shave a few million dollars from that estimate if Google gets someone to provide the ASICs - they were rumored to be using Broadcom for their 10GbE switches. Google may not be ready to fab their own silicon but they'll need custom silicon if they want to achieve the forwarding rates found in a modern router such as a Juniper (that is unless their developers are "other-worldly" - they're too far from Area 51 and I didn't see anyone with dark eyes and huge craniums in my visits). We can shave off a few million dollars more because Google won't need marketing and sales to sell this new device, they won't be kneeling at the altar of Verizon and AT&T trying to get large telecom companies to take notice of their new hardware. In other words, this is probably a $20-$30 million problem for Google and they have the ability to solve it themselves.
So, who cares if Google builds a router? Well, their current supplier of high-end routers for one. Is it really fair, however, to lay this 'failure' at the feet of Juniper? Wall Street bounced Juniper a little bit on the news last week, but then, Wall Street has all of the macho of my 91 year-old grandmother these days. No, Juniper isn't to blame, nor is this anything more than a short-term threat to Juniper's revenue (and it's hard to say just how much revenue, all we know is that Google isn't Juniper's largest reported client - Verizon Business is with 10% of reported revenue). On a side note, it would have been interesting to see the market's reaction to this event if the supplier where Cisco, not Juniper.
In the long term, unless Google has had this project under wraps for some time I'd be shocked to see a device in less than 12 months, and even more shocked to see Google get that device in place, tested, functioning and manufactured in numbers in less than 24 months. Even at that, this device will never make it out into the wild, it won't be competing with the likes of Juniper or Cisco. In each of the cases where Google chose to build rather than buy, the only effect has been to remove Google from the list of potential customers for servers, switches and now, perhaps, routers. The server market didn't collapse, the market for 10GbE switches didn't collapse, the market for routers won't collapse either.
If I were a betting man, I'd bet that Juniper will be fighting hard to stay involved with this project. Google is a unique animal in this industry - so unique in fact that it may not be profitable to be their router or switch company. That is not to say, however that it won't be beneficial to learn from what they're doing. Juniper may be uniquely positioned to offer their silicon and in exchange, learn from what Google is doing. It's all speculation, but if I had to bet on it, I believe it may be better for Juniper than first thought.
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