re: Would Juniper Go to Extremes?Juniper learned it's lesson with the failed Pacific Broadband purchase... I doubt you will see Juniper purchase a company that does not add immediate, substantial and growing revenue to the bottom line.
re: Would Juniper Go to Extremes?Is not to buy Extreme, where their market share numbers are dropping like a stone and the VARs and channel partners are fleeing. They should just OEM them if anything. Juniper likes winners and Extreme doesn't qualify.
Juniper's play is to pick up Foundry, which is on the rise, as a merger of equals (the only way BJ considers it--BJ becomes COO and Vice Chair?), or buy Force10, which has the most compelling high end switch on the market and is probably a lot cheaper than the $1.5B price tag Extreme would command. Juniper made its name selling high end gear, and leveraging it downsteam. Force10 gets them there, and it also plays in service provider networks with its QOS and high availability story.
Juniper needs to get Netscreen out of the hardware business, fast, and get their software ported to someone's blades as fast as they can, or they'll drown in commodity hardware and lose out on the 10gigE upgrade cycle that's happening right now.
They also need a WLAN play if they are going to get a foothold in the LAN, where Cisco is suddenly vulnerable.
re: Would Juniper Go to Extremes?The PB aquistion and push into cable was a tad different than Juniper's current endeavors. Cable is an insular world and many companies have trouble breaking into that part of the world that touches the HFC network. They can sell routers to MSOs, but even better now that they don't compete with their CMTS friends.
Juniper knows routing and will know security via Netscreen. That's a beatiful combo to take on Cisco in the enterprise. Now they will have a channel (Netscreen's current distributors) and can also sell an alternative to a Catalyst switch if they pick up an established switch player (with CHANNELS!).
It will be hard work building an enterprise brand, but the SPs trust them already for their infrastructure and that's a channel as well.
Also, Juniper has been bashing Cisco in the WSJ for over a year. There are lots of enterprise executives reading that and hearing the Juniper name.
"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!" -Nietzsche
--------- Juniper learned it's lesson with the failed Pacific Broadband purchase... I doubt you will see Juniper purchase a company that does not add immediate, substantial and growing revenue to the bottom line.
re: Would Juniper Go to Extremes?This is by far the dumbest quote I've read in an LR article:
If Juniper wants even more of the enterprise, Extreme could be the next step. "Juniper may continue its push into the enterprise. A Layer 3 switch company may round out its enterprise perspective," says the man named Sue.
re: Would Juniper Go to Extremes?Remember when everyone thought the T640 would be called the M320? Well, looks like the M320 lives again: http://www.juniper.net/product...
re: Would Juniper Go to Extremes?Cisco buying procket would give cisco nothing. Procket has no particular compelling value. Its not a good MSE system, its not a good core system. Procket got by for a long time on Tony's name, but thats over now.
I suppose they could buy the engineers and embark on the HFR2 project, but I dont know how cisco would merge one set of huge egos (HFR) with another set (procket) and make them all happy.
I think Cisco is asleep. They are content with things as they are and with buying their way out of any problem they find themselves in.
re: Would Juniper Go to Extremes?Juniper doesn't need to buy a dog with fleas like Extreme. They can go recruit away the good engineers and sales people and pick up the pieces.
Pacific Broadband purchase... I doubt you will
see Juniper purchase a company that does not
add immediate, substantial and growing revenue
to the bottom line.
-tsat