For a very long time, Juniper lead over Cisco for performance and features. After the run of the original Catalyst switches, Cisco was floundering, resting on their past successes without really pushing anything.

We bought Juniper gear at the time because nothing Cisco had would work well for us. At least at not any sane price point, and lots of restrictions/gotchas.

Cisco finally got their wind back eventually on their Nexus gear, catching up and run neck-and-neck between Juniper & Arista now.