juniper

Countering the naysayers on Juniper

I was in New York yesterday to attend Juniper Networks' big product introduction. If you haven't heard, Juniper announced a new line of Ethernet switches, from small access switches to big data center and core switches.

While I believe this is very good news for Juniper, I couldn't help but overhear some of the lugubrious pontifications of other industry and financial analysts. I expect the "glass half full" crowd to say things like:

1. Big deal, there are already a lot of Ethernet switching companies, so Juniper is just piling onto an existing market. This isn'… Read more

Juniper gets by with a little help from its friends

Unlike other tech industry chief executives, Scott Kriens of Juniper Networks is refreshingly candid and pragmatic.

Despite the fact that Juniper revenue exceeds $2 billion annually and the company's market cap is nearly $13 billion, Kriens recognizes that Juniper just can't match Cisco Systems' product depth, global sales reach, and resources. Kriens still believes that Juniper can compete by following a simple formula: 1. Pick the technical battles it can win; 2. Stay ahead of the industry on innovation and performance; and 3. Acquire and/or partner to supplement Juniper's value.

Kriens' business strategy will be in … Read more

Juniper and Cisco go open! (Well, not really)

The big news from the networking world is that Cisco and Juniper are opening up!!!!! Well, sort of. In a roundabout way. A little bit.

As Dave Roberts of open-source Vyatta points out, all that glitters is not gold when "openness" is on the table:

Juniper started the love-fest with "openness" on Monday with the announcement of its Partner Solution Development Platform (PSDP). Essentially, if you're a big company, and Juniper decides that you're worthy, Juniper will give you the privilege of signing an NDA and paying it yearly fee in order to develop applications that will run on the control plane processor or line cards of its router.… Read more

Sleepycat database fuels Juniper Networks

And to think I believed Mike Olson and his Sleepycat team had gone to sleep in the bowels of Oracle. Not so, as this press release from Oracle attests: Juniper Networks will be integrating Sleepycat's Berkeley DB into its JUNOS software, the network operating system that powers its routers.

Sounds like a really sweet deal to me. And likely a very big one. But why Berkeley DB?… Read more

HP should buy Juniper

I'm not sure whether the Compaq merger is far enough in the past for Hewlett-Packard to contemplate another major acquisition. But if so, I believe that HP could really shake up with networking status quo by buying Juniper.

This move would certainly take some chutzpah, and it would cost HP somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion to pull this off. Nevertheless, I believe that an acquisition of Juniper makes a ton of sense.

First off, HP and Juniper have almost no product overlap. HP has a strong business in Ethernet edge and core switches, as well as lots … Read more