Networking giant Cisco is still the biggest player in just about every segment of the networking market, but it’s facing a tough time as competitors are biting into its market share, and investors are expecting management to turn in results.  This has put a lot of stress on the company, which is currently restructuring, now that it has eliminated its overly complicated internal decision-making system, as well as thousands of jobs.

The latest update is a series of accusations from the company targeting its biggest competitor, Juniper Networks, and claiming that the latter can’t live up to its customers’ expectations.

“Juniper is “leaving customers and partners disappointed,” said Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s executive vice president of operations. “We think we need to be a little more aggressive in calling out missed promises and missed expectations.”

Juniper rejected these claims. Ray Mota, managing partner of ACG Research, noted how this is a sign that chief executive John Chambers is putting some pressure on execs before an analysts meeting on Tuesday.  They “got the message,” he noted in an interview.

Cisco and Juniper have been competing with each other in the networking space for over a decade, and both them had some news recently.

Juniper for one released an announcement today saying that Latin online media company Terra has switched to its technology.  Networks QFX3500 Switches will soon be introduced to Terra’s datacenter across Miami and Porto Alegre, Brazil, to setup a QFabric network.

Cisco also had an interesting development recently. Back at VMworld 2011 it introduced Virtual Extensible LAN, the next generation networking protocol that is designed for enterprise-scale virtualized environments.  Soni Jiadani, senior vice president for Cisco, talked about the new offering and gave us an insight into Cisco’s goals during her visit at theCube.