Where are you focusing most of your attention?

The first area is around making connections both internally as I meet with Juniper employees around the world, as well as externally as I meet with customers, partners, analyst and investors.

The second is driving execution through hands-on engagement in the management processes that we use to run this business. I've been very engaged on both the engineering side as well as the sales and marketing side in that regard; and then the third priority I have is shaping our three-year strategic plan and delivering as part of that an operating plan for 2009.

Former CEO and current Chairman Scott Kriens says you were brought on to scale the company -- that at Microsoft, you've been where Juniper wants to go. What are the specific growth targets for next three to five years?

We're in the middle of putting together that three-year strategic plan and having more clarity around the specific growth aspirations. But at our financial analyst meeting at the beginning of this year we sort of said we're trying to drive 20 percent plus in top line revenue growth. The fundamental growth drivers for high-performance networking are good long term and that is a market segment that will continue to grow. And our ability to innovate and deliver great products and engage with customers means that we should be able to grow faster than that market and take share. And in doing that we should be able to drive good top-line growth.

With current market valuations being attractive due to the overall economy, will acquisitions play a greater role in that growth?

Our primary value creation will come from our organic R&D. That said, we're going to have a lot of partnerships that help us take that innovation that we have and allow others to innovate on top of it or to integrate other elements of a solution together. And certainly there may be areas when we look at the product portfolio and there may be some gaps that we need to fill or some complementary areas that an acquisition would make sense. And if we do consider an acquisition, it would have to meet a certain set of criteria around a strategic rationale, a financial rationale and some assessment of the integration that would be required. But it's really about organic R&D.

What is Juniper's most important asset: JUNOS or the ASICs?

I actually think it's both. We focus on R&D for the silicon -- which in some ways you can think of as frozen software -- and we focus on R&D around JUNOS and how JUNOS takes advantage of the silicon and how the silicon enables JUNOS.