Juniper Networks, which a month or two back gained serious levels of investment from Ericsson, Lucent Technologies, Nortel, Siemens/Newbridge, 3Com and Worldcom subsidiary UUNET, has said IBM is working with it on custom ASICs for its optical-electrical Internet backbone devices. Juniper's systems are intended to increase routing and switching speeds in Internet backbones, and the deal with IBM will integrate Juniper software with IBM silicon logic. But as the deal is with IBM Microelectronics, it doesn't necessarily mean that IBM has decided to vote for Juniper on the networking front. ®