Wall Street has been accused of overreacting to caution exercised by the data center industry over networking purchases.

Network equipment maker Juniper has blamed its disappointing third quarter profits on delays in closing sales deals with North American customers.

Last week Juniper’s networking rival Riverbed Technology also warned that revenue streams are slowing down. Its second-quarter adjusted revenue would miss its forecast, it said, again blaming the delays in closing some large North American deals.

With headlines such as Outlook Weak, the financial press reported Juniper shares were losing 4.71% in after hours trading after closing the day's regular trading session at $24.82.

“Analysts on average had expected a profit of 38 cents on revenue of $1.22 billion,” said RTT.Com.

One technology analyst, however, said the financial community has misjudged the mood of the data center industry.

“The released figures are for Q2, where it slightly exceeded expectations – six quarters of continuous growth,” Clive Longbottom, senior researcher at IT analyst company Quocirca, said.

“Juniper gave an advisory on Q3 that it expects some softness in its earnings – which is what Wall Street, in its infinite lack of wisdom, is seizing upon.”

With carriers and data center operators making up a substantial sector of Juniper’s North America client base, the effects of disruptive networking technologies are being seen.

“These companies are, at the moment, very wary about making strategic investments in existing network technology, as we see a shift to a more software driven environment. Carriers have found that software-defined networking (SDN) does not cut the mustard for them, as it can be heavily impactful on line-speed data streams. So the whole market has come up with its own approach, network functions virtualization (NFV) that takes a slightly different approach to certain functions that carriers need far more than standard commercial data centers,” Longbottom said.

As network equipment vendors begin to support both SDN and NFV, data centers and carriers will have to buy tactically until the market matures enough for them to make longer-term strategic decisions, he said.

“Juniper is fine,” said Longbottom, “it will get there with its approach to SDN and NFV. It’s Wall Street that is blind to anything that exists more than 12 weeks away.”