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Biz Break: Juniper Networks CEO leaves, conduct questioned [San Jose Mercury News](San Jose Mercury News (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 10--Today: Juniper Networks makes its second sudden and mysterious CEO change in a year, dumping Shaygan Kheradpir for longtime employee Rami Rahim. Also: GoPro falls while planning secondary offering, two big-data firms plot IPOs. The Lead: Juniper Networks CEO resigns less than a year after taking over Almost exactly a year after announcing Shaygan Kheradpir as its new leader, Juniper Networks said Monday that the CEO resigned amid a disagreement about his conduct in dealings with an unnamed customer. The Sunnyvale networking company named veteran employee Rami Rahim as CEO on Monday, effective immediately, and said that Kheradpir had departed as CEO and from the board of directors. "His resignation follows a review by the board of directors of his leadership and his conduct in connection with a particular negotiation with a customer," the company said in its announcement. "The board and Kheradpir have different perspectives regarding these matters." Kheradpir was announced as Juniper's CEO on Nov. 13, 2013, after predecessor Kevin Johnson retired at the age of 52 while the company faced an investigation into suspected corrupt foreign practices. "This is just another head-scratching chapter in the Juniper book," FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said in a telephone interview Monday. "There must be something in the coffee there." The former Barclays executive officially took over on Jan. 1 this year, and faced immediate pressure from activist investor Elliot Management, which demanded cost cuts, a higher dividend and stock repurchases; Kheradpir agreed to cut $160 million in expenses and return about $3 billion to investors while laying off roughly 6 percent of Juniper's workforce. Juniper said the reorganization begun under Kheradpir would continue under Rahim, one of the company's early employees who was most recently executive vice president and general manager for development and innovation. "I am honored to be asked to lead Juniper -- a company I have dedicated 17 years of my career to -- at such an important time in our history," Rahim said in a prepared statement. Ives said managing the second CEO change in a year while attempting to reorganize a company will be bumpy, but elevating an employee who has been with Juniper so long could help. "When something like this happens, you need the 'internal mayor' to take over," the analyst said. "You need the guy who internally has credibility, because something like this can cause unrest not only externally but within an organization." With Kheradpir in charge, Juniper's cost-cutting methods increased profits while revenues remained nearly static. Through the first nine months of 2014, the company reported net income of $435.3 million, or 91 cents a share, on sales of $3.53 billion; in the same time period last year, Juniper had profits of $288 million, or 56 cents a share, on revenues of $3.4 billion. Forrester tech-infrastructure analyst Andre Kindness noted that Juniper's growth struggles stem from a changing networking sector, where companies are targeting specific industries because of varying demands, such as high-flying Arista Networks, the Santa Clara company that is finding big growth after its initial public offering by targeting the financial industry's need for speedy networking gear. "This is a problem all networking companies are going through. They're all going to have to figure out who they want to be -- Do they want to serve the cloud providers? Do they want to serve the generic data center, or the campus or branch office?" Kindness said. "These guys are all going to have to figure out where they're going to make their money, because they can't do it everywhere." Juniper could return to a stronger focus on wireless carriers to follow this trend, Kindness said, but that plan could run into turbulence with a new leader at the helm. "Overall, I think it's damaging to any growth we'll see out of Juniper for at least another 18 months," he predicted. "Any new CEO, I'd say it takes 12 to 18 months before you start to see their strategy work, and during that time there could be a huge amount of changes internally." Juniper stock dropped 1.9 percent to $21.50 in Monday's regular session, then dipped another 1.5 percent in late trading after the change was announced. At its closing price, Juniper shares have declined 4.6 percent in 2014. SV150 market report: GoPro slides after announcing secondary offering Wall Street continued with its record-setting ways Monday, posting gains despite a drop from one of Silicon Valley's hot young stocks, GoPro. GoPro filed for a secondary offering that will bring the company an estimated $100 million and allow employees and investors to cash out in an orderly fashion, avoiding the uncertainty that investors sometimes show at the end of a lockup period. Slightly more than four months after raising over $400 million in an IPO, the San Mateo action-camera company will juice its cash reserves a bit more to fund growth opportunities, analysts said. With fresh shares on the way, some investors dumped their stock, sending GoPro down 4.2 percent to $75.75. Investors who cashed in their GoPro profits on Monday could soon have some fresh Silicon Valley stocks to bet on: Two big-data software companies filed plans for IPOs on Monday, Palo Alto's HortonWorks and San Francisco's New Relic. The area's most valuable tech company, Apple, dropped 0.2 percent to 0.2 percent to $108.83 after Milpitas security company FireEye disclosed an iOS vulnerability to app-based hacking attacks; FireEye gained 5.8 percent to $32.39 on the day. Google gained 1.2 percent to $558.23 after announcing a program to boost funds to fight Ebola, and Facebook -- which already launched a similar campaign -- dropped 0.8 percent to $75 while announcing a milestone for its Facebook Messenger app. San Jose solar manufacturer SunPower announced a new acquisition and shares gained 0.6 percent to $30.40, while Gilead Sciences added 0.5 percent to $107.02 after Merck's rival hepatitis C medication performed worse than expected in trials. Up: LinkedIn, Zynga, Yahoo, SolarCity, VMware, HP, Oracle, Intuit, Nvidia, Google, Yelp Down: GoPro, Juniper, Twitter, Intel, Facebook, AMD, Cisco The SV150 index of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies: Up 4.8, or 0.29 percent, to 1,637.63 The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Up 19.08, or 0.41 percent, to 4,651.62 The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Up 39.81, or 0.23 percent, to 17,613.74 And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Up 6.34, or 0.31 percent, to 2,038.26 Sign up for the 60-Second Business Break newsletter at www.siliconvalley.com. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510. ___ (c)2014 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |