Juniper Networks rebranding and moving deeper into enterprise territory?

Wow, what is their marketing department thinking?

I’ve read several articles on Forbes.com and Network World this week about Juniper rebranding as they try to make a move deeper into enterprise space. I guess part of this change is hiring the same elementary school class who made Cisco’s crayon logo a few years ago to make over their logo.

All joking aside, Juniper has been pushing hard all year to make a big move into the enterprise space that Cisco has ruled comfortably for years. There is a fair bit of competition in the lower end enterprise space but when you start looking at medium to large sized businesses, they are more or less dominated by Cisco. Jim Metzler and Steve Taylor in this Network World article about a possible Juniper acquisition of Riverbed seem to have missed all of the clear indications that Juniper is heavily invested in making a move into enterprise space. Check out this quote from the article:

We doubt it in part because we don’t see the two companies being a good fit. Although Riverbed certainly does sell into service providers, it is primarily a fast moving enterprise-focused company. Juniper’s DNA is clearly in the service-provider market. In addition, the cost to of acquiring Riverbed would be very high – probably around $2 billion.

Now, I don’t disagree that Juniper completely failed to properly leverage their Peribit acquisition to remain market leaders in the WAN acceleration space, but Riverbed could be the jewel in Juniper’s enterprise offering. $2 billion is a hefty price to pay, but just look at a few of the things Juniper has done in the last few years to prepare for a large move into the enterprise space:

• Offered 100% discount on certification testing and introduced an entirely new line of enterprise certifications as part of a new Fast Track program
• Earlier this year there were multiple job postings on Juniper’s website for a new Transition team (including Chief Transition Officer) that would work to rapidly shift the focus of the company and work to help integrate the new focus into Juniper’s existing company culture
• In the last five years Juniper acquired NetScreen, Peribit, introduced the J-Series routers and low end EX switches for enterprises, and versions of their IDP and SRX specifically aimed at the enterprise space
• Juniper Partner program that is becoming geared specifically towards companies that will sell their enterprise equipment

The writing has been on the wall for awhile and to anyone who has been looking in the last two years it should be very obvious that this is the next step for them. The Service Provider market has been rapidly shrinking in the last 10 years as a result of all of the consolidation and consequently Juniper’s primary customer base is shrinking. The next logical step is into the enterprise space.

Cisco’s heavy focus on enterprise space (higher profit margins) allowed Juniper it’s start in the Service Provider space and also let them grab a large chunk of the core router market. The JUNOS (Juniper Router Operating System) was developed on a BSD kernel for their hardware based routers that offered better throughput and faster switching (and the same OS across all of their router platforms!) as opposed to Cisco’s IOS based routers. (The Cisco Router Internet Operating System has so many different revisions and forks you’d need a historian to keep track…) In the last few years, Cisco’s acquisition of Procket Networks led to a renewed focus on the core router market and included the roll outs of the ASR and CRS-1 series hardware based routers running a brand new IOS XR. (IOS XR is based on the QNX Neutrino microkernel which may actually mean better longterm stability, read this link for more information.) As a result they have cut further into Juniper’s main source of income.

Let’s just hope this rebranding and shift to enterprise focus doesn’t compromise the excellent service provider quality routers and software they have developed. If anything, let’s hope enterprises can now (affordably) benefit from JUNOS in their wiring closets.