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Carl-Henric Svanberg, CEO of telecom hardware maker Ericsson, said his company has no interest in acquiring Juniper Networks.

After the Alcatel (ALA) and Lucent (LU) deal took place, speculation over the future of Juniper Networks (JNPR) began to swirl.

Those rumors soon filtered around to the point where the Swedish tech firm Ericsson (ERICY) had to deny they were looking at Juniper with an open checkbook in hand.

Svanberg told reporters on Monday, "It's not critical for us to own routers... We have not looked at them," in reference to Juniper.

Hopeful investors pushed Juniper up amid that speculation, but the deflating comments by Svanberg pushed the stock price back to 18.76.

For Juniper's part, the company continued forward with its normal business. The company announced the availability of its next-generation Secure Access SSL VPN Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) appliances, the SA 4000 FIPS and SA 6000 FIPS.

Those products are intended for government use, particularly at the federal level. Juniper does need to see significant adoption of those and other parts of its hardware lines in the wake of the Alcatel-Lucent merger.

Lucent has been one of Juniper's biggest customers, along with Ericsson and Siemens. The business Lucent gave Juniper would likely go to Alcatel now, draining a large part of Juniper's revenue stream, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.