Now Adtran has gotten into the action, buying wireless LAN vendor Bluesocket. Adtran is a manufacturer of low-cost, NetVanta-branded network infrastructure based in Alabama (it also sells carrier grade infrastructure to service providers) that sells mostly into wiring closets. BlueSocket is a  Massachusetts-based, venture-backed startup founded in 1999.

Last year Bluesocket launched what it calls “virtual wireless LAN” or vWLAN. While most WLAN vendors still rely on a hardware-based centralized controller, Bluesocket has abstracted its controller appliance as software, allowing it to run as a virtual machine on a VMware host server. By freeing the WLAN control plane from a hardware appliance, Bluesocket offers solutions to two wireless networking challenges: scale and cost. A software-based controller is cheaper than a physical appliance, and the scalability of the controller is bounded only by the power of a customer’s virtual infrastructure. As more access points are brought online, customers can devote more computing resources to the virtual controller or add more virtual instances.

Prior to its transition to vWLAN, Blusocket’s largest controller appliance could support up to 200 access points and 4,000 users, according to Chris Koeneman, Bluesocket vice president of sales and marketing. In tests and trials with its virtual controller, the company has scaled up to 1,500 access points and 48,000 users. Koeneman noted that Bluesocket’s virtual controller could scale higher than that. It hasn’t hit a ceiling in tests yet.

Bluesocket’s was named a visionary on Gartner’s last Magic Quadrant for enterprise wireless LAN infrastructure vendors. However, the company is small and it was in the midst of building out a channel partner program. Adtran, on the other hand, is a fairly large (2010 revenue was $606 million), diversified networking vendor with a large sales channel, according to Gary Bolton, Adtran’s vice president of global marketing.

Bolton said Adtran will put its R&D budget into Bluesocket in order to integrate its products with the NetVanta line, particularly around network management and the consistency of network access across wired and wireless connections.

• Juniper’s share of the Ethernet switching market stands somewhere between 2% and 3%. Not a huge share, but very good for a company that entered the switching market in 2008.
• Juniper invested more than 20% of revenue into research and development this past year.
• Half of Juniper’s employees are engineers and 75% those engineers write software.
• When asked to compare the corporate cultures of Juniper and Microsoft, Johnson said Microsoft was conflict-oriented, where people challenged each other’s work in order to foster innovation. At Juniper, eh said, the focus is much more on collaboration.

Much of this information is out there already, I suppose. But I thought it all came together to make a nice snapshot of what’s happening inside Juniper right now.

And now Juniper Networks has finally acknowledged its inescapable attraction to WLAN, announcing yesterday that it had struck a deal with Belden to buy Trapeze Networks for about $152 million. Belden, a network cable manufacturer, bought Trapeze two years ago for about $133 million.

Juniper has become a strong Cisco alternative in the campus networking space with its growing line of EX switches, but the nature of office networks is changing.  A great many offices today still have plenty of Ethernet cables and ports pulled to every desk. But more and more of those offices also have a wireless LAN overlay, so that employees can unplug their laptops and carry them to a meeting or the lunch room without losing network access. Yours truly has that option today.

It’s only a matter of time before some enterprises decide to cut down on the number of ports they pull to desks and start replacing some of the switches in their wiring closets with WLAN access points. Juniper is expanding and future-proofing its foothold in campus networks by expanding into wireless LAN.

Juniper will also have an opportunity to integrate its wired networking products with Trapeze’s WLAN technology. Wired and wireless integration, for simplified deployment and management, has been much hyped about these past couple years, but very little has been done in the area.

For some ideas on how that integration might unfold, check out Andre Kindness’s Forrester Research blog.

Central to the release is the software strategy that includes a revamped version of Junos OS (Junos SDK), the Junos Space application platform (with open APIs) and the Junos Pulse network client that will provide security and identity management, VPN control, and connection control.

The new strategy ultimately extends Junos from network devices to the layers of the network, enabling users to program applications into the very layers of the network, enriching services, optimization and control.

The Junos Trio chipset with so-called 3D Scaling technology will be delivered in modular line cards for Juniper MX Series, providing two to four times faster throughput than the competition — up to 2.6 terabits per second.

Beyond speed, the chipset runs on a new architecture based on a “Network Instruction Set Processor” with software on the device that can be customized for network behavior control rather than general purpose instructions, writes Tom Nolle, president of the CIMI Corporation in his Uncommon Wisdom blog. He continues:

In this respect, the chip is almost like an ASIC, but unlike an ASIC it’s programmable at the primitive NISP-instruction level, so new features can be added right down to the instruction level. It’s this architecture that accounts for the considerable improvements in performance, scalability, power efficiency, etc. that Juniper has demonstrated (through independent lab tests).

Juniper also announced a host of new partnerships that will bring it directly in competition with Cisco in the data center. The Juniper-IBM OEM will be extended, with IBM now selling Juniper’s SRX line. Under the Dell-Juniper agreement, Dell will sell Juniper’s networking equipment (it has a similar deal with Brocade) and the companies will deploy a common OS (JUNOS) and management platform.

As part of another partnership, Blade Networks will develop blade switches running on JUNOS.

But does the costly rebranding reflect the importance of this latest technology push? Depends on who you ask.

Juniper was still short on technology details, withholding the actual announcement until Thursday at the official launch. But executives milling about confirmed a super-powered Juniper chipset that one managed service provider at the event said would ensure huge amounts of transport to the millisecond.

That may be what Juniper is referring to with its new marketing tag: “The New Network.”

Juniper insiders also confirmed the launch of an open API network-based application platform that will enable developers to spin their own apps all running on JUNOS, Juniper’s OS that stretches across all of its networking and security products. One executive said Juniper “realized it needed a software strategy” but didn’t want to “buy other companies to make that happen.” An obvious swipe at Cisco.

If there is a data center equipment plan, it appears to come in the form of an OEM partnership which Dell announced Wednesday afternoon. As part of that agreement, Dell will sell Juniper’s networking gear (it has a similar deal with Brocade), and the companies will deploy a common OS (most likely being JUNOS) and management platform. That could position Juniper to take on Cisco in the data center, but is still not the execution of the “data center vision” it promised last winter.

“They have a ‘data center vision’, but no real plan still,” said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala, questioning where the news was behind all of the hoopla.

Kerravala also criticized Juniper for lacking a plan to deliver mobile data. Cisco bought into that strategy when it acquired Starent this month.

As for the rebranding – Juniper executives denied there was serious extravagance involved, and said it is all necessary.

“The company didn’t have a marketing bone in its body before,” said Juniper channel chief Frank Vitagliano. “This is perfect timing now that we are coming out of a bad economic time.”

So while endless appetizer shrimp + Wall Street still equal excess amid a recession to some, a top Juniper marketing executive promised the company’s brand re-launch was within the “typical marketing budget” … to which Kerravala responded, “What’s typical?”

The company has pre-briefed every analyst in sight and clearly plied them with drinks, money or … something … because none of them will drop the dime on the announcement either.

What is clear is this: This announcement had better be data center related. After all, last February, Juniper announced it was working on the Stratus Project – a data center initiative meant to combine storage, compute, switching and networking all on Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). But the announcement included no specific product details or actual release dates.

It appeared that Stratus was a slap back at Cisco, which “leaked” news of its upcoming blade server and Cisco Unified Computing data center architecture just a month earlier.

The thing is, Cisco followed swiftly (in March) with actual product announcements and release dates.

Juniper’s non-announcement frustrated those in the networking community so much that one reader on NetworkWorld’s Cisco Subnet Blog, wrote in:

“Juniper doesn’t have anything or they would be releasing it! They got caught holding their imaginations and have no where to turn. ‘I have a super special architecture that will crush all others, will blow your mind, run all OS’s, run terabit Ethernet, and make coffee in the morning. Due out 2013.’ Give me a break, its like little children on the playground.”

That may have been a bit harsh, but it’s time for Juniper to come forth with a solid data center plan if it really wants to be competitive. Since Juniper said that Stratus was meant to be an architecture that would be built on a number of vendor partnerships in combination with its existing technology, this very cryptic Juniper press invitation does lead one to believe the hoopla is, in fact, about the data center after all.

“This will be the company’s most significant event in their 12-year history and will be hosted by Juniper’s CEO, Kevin Johnson. The company will be unveiling new hardware and software products, new partnerships and new go-to-market programs as part of the event.”

 Juniper set the stage, now it’s time to put on the show. We’ll be there to let you know if that actually happens this time around.

In a joint press event, Juniper and the NYSE claimed that the 10 Gibabit Ethernet (GbE) network infrastructure in the data centers will support internal round-trip latency of 50 microseconds. The data centers will have EX 8216 chassis switches in their cores and EX 2500 top-of-rack switches providing access to 10 GbE servers. The data center designs also call for the use of Juniper’s MX Series Ethernet Services Routers.

One interesting bit of information which came to my attention with this release is that the EX 2500 (which does not run Juniper’s JUNOS operating system) is a third party technology (possibly from Blade Network Technologies) which Juniper OEMs.

One of those markets, of course, is blade servers. Cisco announced its new Unified Computing System this spring, putting it in direct competition with companies that it has historically partnered with: IBM, HP and Dell. BusinessWeek noted that IBM alone sells about $3 billion worth of Cisco’s network technology through its consulting services.  Since rumors of Cisco’s move into servers started spreading, IBM has since increased its ties to Cisco’s networking rivals. It has partnered with Juniper on its Stratus cloud computing project and it announced an OEM agreement to sell IBM-branded versions of Brocade’s Ethernet switching and routing gear.

One analyst, Sam Wilson of JMP Securities, told BusinessWeek that the souring relationships between Cisco and the consulting arms of HP and IBM could force Cisco to develop its own consulting services. He said: “If push comes to shove” Cisco could simply buy Accenture, one of the biggest consulting firms on the market.

Cisco doesn’t seem to be shy about making such a sizable acquisition, either. Cisco’s mergers an acquisitions chief Ned Hooper told BusinessWeek that Cisco could easily afford a $10 billion deal right now. It has $33 billion in cash. But Hooper went on to say that Cisco will focus on smaller deals for now.

In this blog post I’ll review this year’s Magic Quadrant for the LAN market, and I’ll compare it to last year’s Magic Quadrant for Campus LAN infrastructure, which is essentially a measure of the same market.

As I wrote above, Cisco is THE leader in the LAN market, scoring high in both of Gartner’s criteria for the quadrant: completeness of vision and ability to execute.  In their assessment of Cisco”s position, analysts Mark Fabbi and Tim Zimmerrman noted that Cisco maintains the broadest portfolio of LAN switching and WLAN technology on the market. The introduction of its Nexus switches have shown that Cisco is providing some leadership in addressing emerging connectivity demands in data centers.

However, Gartner cautioned that Cisco remains the high-priced vendor, with some workgroup switching products being twice as much as alternative products on the market. Gartner also said Cisco might be taking its customers for granted, especially those customers who believe in buying networking gear from more than one vendor. The analysts wrote:

We are hearing increasing concerns about Cisco’s presales organization taking customers for granted, and not providing expected levels of service, especially for customers that have not endorsed an end-to-end Cisco solution.

The only other leader in this Magic Quadrant is HP ProCurve, which was a leader last year as well.  Gartner described ProCurve as the fasted growing LAN switch vendor during the past two years and when clients speak with Gartner about their shortlists for vendors, ProCurve is the the second-most-asked-about vendor after Cisco. Gartner praised ProCurve’s integration into HP’s Technology Services group, which gives it access to HP’s broader sales force. It also praised ProCurve’s low cost of ownership and the successful integration of the WLAN technology it acquired with Colubris Networks.

But Gartner cautioned that ProCurve still lacks high-end core switches (An acquisition of a high end core switching vendor like Arista Networks or Blade Network Technologies would do the trick!). The company also needs to expand its channel for larger sales opportunities. ProCurve has in the past been known as a good vendor for SMBs.

A third leader from last year’s campus LAN Magic Quadrant fell down a notch in this year’s quadrant. Foundry Networks, now known as Brocade, the storage networking company that bought Foundry last year, was classified as a visionary in this year’s Quadrant, scoring high on its completeness of vision but scoring a little lower than last year in its ability to execute.

Gartner praised Brocade’s integration of Foundry but said Foundry lost momentum last year due to its U.S.-centric and data-center-centric sales focus. Gartner said it wants to see market evidence that Brocade’s integration of Foundry is successful and that Brocade can regain market momentum.  I have no doubt that last week’s announcement of a new Ethernet switching OEM agreement between IBM and Brocade will go a long way toward helping Brocade regain some of that lost momentum that Gartner is looking for.

Gartner identified three other visionaries in this year’s Quadrant: 3Com, Enterasys/Siemens and Extreme Networks.

Last year Gartner classified 3Com as a niche player, but it elevated the vendor to a visionary in this year’s Quadrant, giving it higher marks for its completeness of vision. Gartner praised 3Com’s revamped product lines and its growing market share in China and other emerging markets. H3C, 3Com’s Chinese subsidiary, has a 35% market share in China, for instance. And 3Com has a very large, low-cost R&D workforce in China. 3Com recently told me H3C has 2,300 engineers in China.  But Gartner cautioned that 3Com and H3C have been, until recently, run as two separate companies. It will be important for the two to integrate. Also, 3Com has very little market penetration outside of Asia. Gartner warned that taking products developed for China and selling them globally will be a challenge.

Enterasys, which merged with Siemens Enterprise Communications last year as part of a Gores Group acquisition, maintained last year’s position as a visionary. It drew praise from Gartner for it full complement of products from the data center to the access layer, its tightly integrated security technology, and good customer buzz around support and services. But Gartner said Enterasys’s market footprint remains small and its distribution channel is limited. Marketing has also been weak, Gartner said, as the market waits for the new combined company Enterasys/Siemens to change its name.

Extreme Networks, the third visionary in the Quadrant, drew praise for broadening its XOS-based switch line and its policy-based configuration and open architecture. But Gartner noted that Extreme is struggling to maintain revenue and it remains one of the smallest vendors in the market. Gartner also cited some support issues affecting the company’s install base.

Gartner identified two niche players in this year’s Magic Quadrant. First there is Nortel, which was downgraded from its visionary status in last year’s Quadrant. Gartner cited Nortel’s bankruptcy as an impediment to the company competing for new business. Gartner is predicting significant loss of market share and revenue for the company as it remains in bankruptcy. Gartner also said Nortel needs a new core switching platform.

The second visionary, Alcatel-Lucent, drew praise for a solid product strategy and its growing market share and revenue; however, Gartner said the company needs to invest more in R&D to keep pace with the latest innovations in data center switching and wireless LAN technology.

Force10 Networks, which was identified as a niche player last year, was dropped altogether from this year’s Magic Quadrant because it no longer meets Gartner’s revenue requirements for inclusion, whch is 1% of ports sold overall or 5% of ports sold in a specific market segment.

Gartner also noted that Juniper Networks has entered the Ethernet switch market, but it hasn’t earned enough of a revenue share to be included in this year’s Magic Quadrant. Juniper’s switches earned the company $56 million in 2008.

So there you have it, for what it’s worth. Cisco remains on top, but the other players in the market continue to make moves. ProCurve and 3Com are on the rise. Nortel and Force10 are in decline. Everyone else is looking to take a step forward.

Cisco’s rivals, particularly its rivals in the networking market, are eager to offer their opinions on what Cisco is trying to do. Michael Morisy will take a deeper look into that with a story on SearchNetworking.com tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s some of the feedback I’ve received from them over the last 24 hours.

Juniper

First up is Mike Banic, Juniper’s vice president of product marketing for Ethernet platforms. He notes that Cisco’s event was more conceptual than technical because Cisco may have been forced to unveil this project a little early.

There was a rumor that this event was happening a lot earlier than [Cisco] had planned because of the article in the Wall Street Journal on California. It looks like that reporter had a lot of good facts. So they moved this up because they didn’t expect anybody to get these details and they needed to slowly unfurl the story. They’d rather be telling this story when they have more details to share. i don’t think they’re really there. If they wante dto show us how they coulud simplify management [of the data center], they would demonstrate that. Otherwise, it’s just words.

Banic offered a contrast between Cisco’s approach and Juniper’s approach to simplifying management of data centers.

[Cisco is] not suggesting anything new here. Simplified management of compute resources and networks is something vendors in this market have been doing for awhile, like HP and IBM and newer entrants like VMware. For us, it’s very different from our strategy. We’ve focused on being network pure-play. The network is our strength. We’re not going to wander into knew worlds like servers. We’re focusing on connections. [Cisco] is going to perpetuate the multi-layer network model, whereas the Juniper vision is to have the whole data center network look like one switch. It will be multiple switches, but it will all look like one switch [in the management console]. We already have something like that with our virtual chassis switch. We can build a single logical switch for the data center. That’s what Project Stratus is.

Banic also noted that Cisco’s entry into the server market will further drive a wedge between it and traditional server manufacturers like IBM and HP, which Cisco has partnered with in the past. “Those vendors are in a better position and have more expertise and history with servers than we as a networking vendor. And we’re in a better position to work with those partners, like IBM.”

Brocade/Foundry

Brocade has been positioning itself to become a player in the data center networking market, particularly through its acquisition of Foundry Networks.  Elizabeth Walther, Brocade’s senior public relations manager, offered me the following observations:

• Cisco’s approach to Unified Computing is not revolutionary. Many companies with extensive experience in solving complex data center issues are already working on solutions
• Cisco’s approach is likely to be very capital intensive up front, which will be a major obstacle in light of today’s global economy.
• The challenge at hand — the evolution of the data center to a dynamic, fully virtualized state — is extremely complex and should leverage open architectures and industry standards.

Her second point, that it might be expensive, is a valid point. But I think companies that are looking to transform their data centers in this way know that they will have to lay down money to do it. Also, Cisco isn’t expecting broad adoption of this technology until four or five years out. By then (we hope) the economy should be rebounding.

Brocade is arguing that, despite Cisco’s talk about using open industry standards in Unified Computing, the initiative will still involve too much proprietary technology. Brocade offered this official statement, which expands on that point:

A dynamic and virtualized data center holds the promise of many compelling benefits for end-users including increased server utilization, decrease in power footprint and more efficient operations in general. However, achieving this goal is a complex challenge that can be best tackled by a broad ecosystem of industry partners and not based on a proprietary, singular architecture of one company.

In contrast, Brocade is already helping customers address these challenges by integrating our networking solutions with a range of mature computing, management and storage technologies from some of the strongest companies in the world. These partnerships are leveraging open interfaces/standards, co-developed technology, and products that are available today, which will lower costs and maximize return on investment for customers.

Blade Network Technologies

Blade CEO Vikram Mehta echoed Brocade’s position on Cisco’s ideas of industry standards will lock customers into a “proprietary world” while locking out vendors like HP and IBM that are “trusted open systems suppliers.” He said the standards in Unified Computing are tantamount too “standards with a C” as in Cisco.

Methta trashed Cisco’s announcement in his own blog with 10 reasons why Cisco’s Unified Computing won’t fly. Here are three of them.

• Unified Computing means standards with a “C.” According to Cisco, converged data and storage networking requires Cisco’s Data Center Ethernet (DCE), thus eliminating freedom of choice with a sole-source Cisco-only server and network. This puts at risk integration and interoperability with vast existing installations. The rest of the industry is working on an open approached called Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) using IEEE’s Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards.
• It’s more about packaging than true innovation. For example, Cisco’s fabric extenders carry the same cost structure as switches, as they utilize similar switching silicon, physical interface components, and management processors. When compared to traditional switches – sharing management via “stacking” – the fabric extenders are another example of packaging, not innovation. The more costly data center infrastructure components – CPUs, RAM, and networking silicon – remain unchanged, except Cisco’s prices are higher and – surprise, surprise – more Cisco gear is needed to control them.
• Follow the money – into Cisco’s bank account. Cisco’s “California” server approach requires Cisco’s Nexus 5000 switches that start at $17K for a bare-bones Layer 2 switch and significant premiums for adding Layer 3 and FCoE functionality, so the total cost of ownership will be similar to the cost of living in California.

I should note that Cisco said Unfied Computing does not require investment in Nexus switches. Cisco executives told me the uplinks from a Unfied Computing System can plug into any vendors switches. Of course, customers will get the best performance out of the system by plugging it into Nexus switches, which offer the “unified fabric” technology that Cisco is promoting with Unified Computing.

As I receive more input from Cisco rivals, I will post updates here.