Juniper made $1.08 billion of revenue, down 11 percent year-on-year, GAAP operating margin shrinking year-on-year from 12.8 percent to 5.1 percent, and GAAP net income was 68 percent down year-on-year to $34.4 million.

CEO Rami Rahim predicted a return to growth by the end of 2018 claiming that this year was a “transition year” for Juniper.

CFO Ken Miller told the company's financial conference call the most significant dent was due to a change to the ASC 606 accounting standard, which governs how customer contracts are recognised. This meant “product deferred revenue was $159 million, down $123 million and 44 percent year-over-year...without the impact of [new accounting standard] ASC 606; deferred product revenue would have been up approximately 19 percent year-over-year”, Miller said.

Security was the only product segment to record year-on-year - up 11 percent to $75 million; routers were down  22 percent to $408 million, switching fell five percent to $230 million, and services eased five percent to $372 million.

Rahim said that the transition by Juniper's largest customers from the MX to the PTX platform was a significant headwind for the company in the quarter.

He said cloud customers are expected to be a bright spot through 2018, because “projects that were previously on hold have started moving to deployment”.

EMEA grew eight per cent year-on-year to $308 million.

As for the future, Miller said: “Customer spending remains dynamic and difficult to predict”, but the company expects a return by the third quarter to year-on-year growth.

The PTX platform represented “more than 80 per cent” of cloud routing ports shipped “on a ten gig-equivalent basis”, but that comes at a cost, because that platform is “meaningfully” cheaper on a per-port basis, and it's also a lower margin product on a per-port basis.