Some things never change. Year after year, some of the same network vendors lock horns time and again, trading off successes and failures in a never-ending cycle of power one-upmanship. Or service providers battle their own business and technology demons ceaselessly. We look at the latest developments in four such perennial fights and share how they will affect your business over the next year and beyond.

Cisco vs. the world

For nearly 10 years, we have extolled Cisco's market dominance and praised CEO John Chambers' savvy while pondering the challengers eyeing the company's networking crown. Although many have made a decent run at Cisco, none to date have made more than passing progress.

This time around, Juniper has taken a few pages from Cisco's own playbook to launch a formidable offensive. Not content simply to compete with Cisco in the high-powered carrier-class routing market, Juniper in February began an all-out assault on Cisco's other core market, the Fortune 200. In its first salvo, Juniper bought enterprise-focused security and VPN vendor NetScreen Technologies.

"NetScreen gives Juniper a really strong leg in the enterprise. In particular, it can now play in the security and collaboration spaces, which are areas that are hotly growing and are next-generation, application-focused solutions," says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist.

Juniper fired again at Cisco in the spring with the launch of the Infranet Initiative. Infranets promise to revolutionize the market for public IP services by attacking, in a standard way, the Internet's greatest faults: security and reliability. The Infranet Initiative has received much support from several industry segments. Members include global service providers such as AOL, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Level 3 Communications and Qwest; network gear vendors Ericsson, Lucent and Polycom; and application and computing companies such as HP, IBM and Oracle.

Cisco has yet to jump on the infranet bandwagon. Maybe it doesn't want a new initiative to dull the luster of its own technologies. Or perhaps it would rather not join a group it isn't leading. Either way, Cisco faces a choice: adapt to the new competitive environment or lose market dominance.