SiliconBeat

In order to get Kevin Johnson (pictured below) to leave Microsoft, where he was instrumental in that company’s aborted attempt to buy Yahoo, Juniper agreed to give him $5 million just for signing on the dotted line. He gets $1.5 million for his first year, another $1.5 million for his second, and a final $2 million for his third, according to an SEC filing Monday. Read the rest of this entry »

Juniper Networks is losing another operations executive. Edward Minshull, its executive vice president for worldwide field operations “informed” Juniper’s management Tuesday that he plans to leave the company and terminate his “full-time” employment as of Sept. 30, according to an SEC filing. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the good old days when a top Silicon Valley executive leaving the Bay Area to join a certain large software company in Redmond, Washington, was not exactly news? More often the past few years the travel has been in the other direction, from Seattle area companies to a certain large search-engine company in Mountain View.

Well, Stephen Elop is making news by giving up his job as chief operating officer job at
Juniper Networks after one year to take over as the top executive of Microsoft’s business software division.

The move will actually cut down Elop’s commute to work. He lives in Canada.

Maybe Microsoft put up a sign on the roof of its headquarters that read “If you worked here, you’d be there already” that Elop might have seen on one of his regular commutes down to the valley.

That’s right, Elop was commuting from Canada to Silicon Valley these past two years, and doing it on his employer’s dime. First at Adobe Systems, which bought his previous employer Macromedia in late 2005. Adobe paid out $145,149 to cover Elop’s commuting from Canada in 2006.

After he had been working at Adobe for about six months, Elop told the company in June 2006 he’d be leaving, setting his departure date as Dec.5, one year to the day since he had been hired. For his year of service, Elop was paid a $500,000 salary and $315,000 bonus. Oh, and got a $1.88 million severance payment, on top of that. And all of his restricted shares vested when he left, despite the original performance strings that had been attached to them.

No, we’re not making this up.

At Juniper, where Elop resigned on Wednesday — also one year to the day from when he started — he was guaranteed $200,000 in additional “relocation reimbursement and benefits” plus “reimbursement of travel costs between his current home and Juniper’s offices in Sunnyvale.” That was in addition to his $540,000 salary.

Not coincidentally, we suspect, Wednesday was also the day the first installment vested of a 300,000 option award given him when he was hired in January 2007. Juniper had a very good 2007, with its stock price rising 75 percent last year. The 75,000 shares of his option grant set to vest Wednesday were priced at $20.23, making them worth $794,250 that day.

He starts at Microsoft at the end of the month. Mark the date. You know Elop will.

Nothing makes you feel welcome at your new job like a gushing press release, a six-figure bonus, and more stock options than you can stuff in a gift bag.

According to an 8-K filed Tuesday, Juniper Networks of Sunnyvale announced that it had lured Robyn M. Denholm away from her job as a senior vice president at Sun Microsystems to be its new chief financial officer. Here’s Scott Kriens, Juniper Networks’ chairman and CEO, gushing in the press release:

“Drawing from nearly 25 years of hands-on financial experience with recognized leaders, I know that Robyn will be a valuable contributor in assessing the financial implications of all major business decisions and providing strategic input toward shaping Juniper’s global business objectives and future success.”

Aw, shucks.

As head bean counter, Denholm will get an annual salary of $480,000, a chance to earn a performance bonus worth the same, and a $250,000 signing bonus. The company also threw in 250,000 stock options and another 45,000 restricted stock units.

Juniper is back. And so are its insider stock sales.

The Sunnyvale networking equipment company seemed to be on the endangered species list during the telecom collapse earlier this decade. But it’s rebounded nicely, especially over the past year when its stock has more than doubled. The stock was trading at $32.21 near the end of Thursday.

Insiders put sales on hold for about a year, but began cashing in again in April. Since then, six insiders have sold 1,292,815 shares to collect $36,190,197.

That includes chief executive Scott Kriens, who sold 500,000 shares on July 24 for $30.49 per share to collect $15.2 million. That’s the largest sale in five years at Juniper, according to Thomson Financial. And it brings his total sales to $282.2 million.

While Kriens had the biggest single sale at Juniper, chief technical officer and Juniper co-founder Pradeep Sindhu has had a bigger year so far. Sindhu has sold 650,000 shares over the past three months at prices ranging from $22.68 to $30.91 to collect $17.3 million. Sindhu now has total stock sales of $203.9 million.

Update: Sindhu sold another 100,000 shares this week, according to filings on Thursday. He sold them at $30.69 per share to collect $3.07 million, bringing his total this year to $20.4 million.