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.

Welcome to Collier-Byrd.net. Sara and I have been meaning for awhile to put up a web page to collect photos for family and write about our various interests but I can be a terrible perfectionist and spend way too much time getting something suitable before I ever (or never) get around to using it.

This time I’ve decided to try something different and put up a WordPress site, start posting, and we’ll work out the bugs as we go. I think we’ll actually get use out of the page this way and work on the non-content pieces when I have time.

As I said, the original idea was to collect some photos for family and friends, but we also have a lot of interests we’re planning to cover. Sara was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last year and we have been doing a tremendous amount of research about the disease. As her father’s side of the family has a history of the disease, it wasn’t at all unknown to us, but suffering from an auto-immune disease is a lot different from knowing about it as a result of family, friends, or acquaintances learning to live with one. Sara really wants to compile a lot of the information we’ve found and relay her personal experiences living with MS to date in hopes it may help others who know someone with MS or people who have been diagnosed that are learning to cope with it. The side benefit of this will be to (hopefully) raise awareness about the disease.

My primary focus for the foreseeable future (other than MS) is working through several professional certification tracks. I have been working for ISPs and Telecommunications companies for the better part of the last 12 years now and while I do have a lot of on the job experience and more than a fair bit of knowledge about the Internet and how it all works, there’s definitely no shortage of new things to learn. I’m currently CCNA certified (Cisco Certified Network Associate), and working towards my CCIP (Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional) and CCNP (Cisco Certified Networking Professional) certifications. At some point, once I finish these two certifications, I am planning to work on the service provider versions of the JNCIA (Juniper Networks Certified Internet Associate) and JNCIS (Juniper Networks Certified Internet Specialist) certifications to round out my experience. When I finish all of this, depending on what I am spending most of my time working on (Cisco or Juniper gear) I’ll look into pursuing one of the IE (Internet(work) Expert) paths. As I’ve got at least a year or two of work in front of me to get to a point where I am choosing an IE path I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself but I definitely want to have a rough timeline in my head to help moving me forward. Part of my learning process is putting together training materials presented in a method that clearly conveys the concepts and ideas I am studying, so I would say that you should expect to see a lot of boring and very technical information about Cisco and Juniper routers as well as different routing protocols, RFCs (Requests for Comments), and IETF drafts on emerging technologies.

Outside of career and health related pursuits Sara and I would like to travel. To start we will probably take day trips on the weekends to see the things we can reach in a day’s drive. As we run out of things to see in a day’s drive we’ll probably start flying. Eventually we would like to see all of the US and plan trips overseas. There’s so much to see and do and we’d like to do as much as we can while we are young. We’re hoping to put together photo diaries to track our travels and we’ll be posting them here. Our first big trip will be to Yellowstone for two weeks at the end of July next year when Sara’s uncle retires. Her aunt and uncle are taking their family out to Yellowstone for a group trip so we’re already planning our days and hoping we can make the most of it.

At any rate I don’t want to put together any kind of gigantic list of everything we’re planning or not planning to do with the site. We hope it will grow organically as our interests and tastes evolve and change and with any luck, you’ll be here with us for all of it.