Juniper Partners: Time For A Switch

While some partners expect Juniper to build a switch line in-house, especially in light of its rollout of its carrier switch portfolio last year, others are following the long-standing rumor that Juniper aims to buy the technology via the acquisition of Extreme.

Switching can be an entry point to a lot of larger enterprise deals, making it harder for Juniper to compete on an even playing field without one, said Jeff Hiebert, CEO of ROI Networks, a solution provider in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.

"It's going to get to the point where if Juniper really wants to slug it out in the enterprise, they're going to have to move away from the point products they have now and more toward an end-to-end play," Hiebert said.

Scott Kriens, chairman and CEO of Juniper, said the vendor prefers to solve strategic problems without having to get into a commodity market.

"The strategy we see is the opportunity to secure and manage the ports regardless of who manufactures them. As long as we see the opportunity to do that, then the company who provides, essentially, the commodity called the Ethernet port itself becomes less important to the user, and their control over it becomes what's strategic," Kriens said "Therefore we can solve a strategic problem with less of an issue of having to become one of the commodity suppliers."

Still, Vitagliano said the company is aware of its partners' call to expand its portfolio.

"The answer is we're listening. Obviously we can't talk about where we intend to go from a strategic standpoint or a product standpoint, but we're certainly listening to them and hearing them," Vitagliano said. "We will develop our plan to ensure that we end up providing what they will need from a solutions standpoint."

Similar questions surround Juniper's lack of a WLAN product line. Now that former Juniper executives Tushar Kothari and Bob Bruce have both joined Meru, speculation has been raised that the wireless vendor is grooming itself as an acquisition target.

Kothari, Meru's senior vice president of worldwide field operations, said that's not the company's focus right now.

"Our focus now is to grow the company, and hopefully, if we're successful, to file our S-1 [to go public]," Kothari said.

With or without a switch, Juniper is working to build more integration into its portfolio. The company plans to roll out products that combine routing and security capabilities on integrated systems that run on its JUNOS networking operating system but incorporate some of the best features of its NetScreen ScreenOS security operating system, said Hitesh Sheth, vice president of service layer technologies, noting that the company will continue to develop standalone products that run on each operating platform.

"What's critical is that we work together in taking the power of JUNOS into the enterprise," Sheth told partners attending the conference. "We need you to help in embracing it and selling it so we can go to market effectively," he said.

The new fast-track certification program was designed with that end it mind, giving free JUNOS training and testing to Cisco-certified professionals.

"What it translates to is simplicity in the technology and the ability to deploy it and to use it and to design it and to troubleshoot it, and that allows more of that technology to be used more easily and more broadly in the network," Kriens said of the integrated operating systems. "We have a continued commitment to building more and more integrated solutions, which will end up being available across the entire portfolio," he said.