Lofted atop robust cloud and software revenues, Juniper Networks posted solid fourth-quarter 2019 earnings on Monday, which saw its overall revenues top $1.28 billion.

During the company's quarterly earnings call, CEO Rami Rahim lauded the company's fourth-quarter performance, which he said signified Juniper's return to year-over-year growth. "For the year, 2019 played out largely as we anticipated, and we were encouraged to finish the year on a high note," Rahim said according to a transcript.

Cloud revenues continued to be a sweet spot for the networking vendor. The vertical saw strong growth for the third consecutive quarter and was up 18% year over year. Meanwhile, software revenues grew 25% year over year. According to Rahim, software now accounts for 12% of the company's overall revenues.

Enterprise revenues also proved to be a bright spot for Juniper, up 2% year over year.

"Our enterprise switching business is seeing healthy momentum growing both quarter over quarter and year over year in the December quarter with our QFX data center products experiencing record orders," Rahim said. "We believe our industry-leading EVPN VXLAN capabilities and Contrail Fabric Management software platforms are resonating in the data center market and should position us to grow this business moving forward."

However, the quarter wasn't all sunshine and rainbows for Juniper. Service provider revenues continued to plague the company, and these declined by 12% in 2019. According to CFO Ken Miller, poor service provider performance ultimately dragged down routing and switching revenues for the full year.

Despite service provider challenges, Rahim assured investors that the company's SD-WAN offerings are seeing "healthy traction."

Security revenues remained a mixed bag for the vendor with year-over-year revenues slightly down. However, an uptick in security orders, which were up 24% since last quarter, drove whole-year revenues up by 3%.

"We believe our security portfolio is highly competitive," Rahim said.

Looking to 2020, Miller said he expects year-over-year growth in both revenues and non-GAAP earnings per share for the first quarter.

As for the company itself, Rahim expects the Mist AI acquisition to become increasingly profitable. Mist is "already exceeding our initial expectations and has the potential to have a material positive impact on our P&L [profit and loss] on a go-forward basis," he said.

Rahim said the company will also focus much of its energy in 2020 on securing the hyperscale switching business as the 400 Gb/s Ethernet cycle comes into full swing. However, Juniper is not predicting revenues in this space until 2021 due to limited availability of the optics.