Juniper

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.

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