Juniper

Nortel’s Ethernet auction: What of the NSN speculation?

It’s almost time to play “Who’s Got the Nortel Ethernet” assets, with the auction coming in little more than a week. The big question is whether NSN, Cisco or another player might jump on Ciena’s stalking-horse opening bid.

Most financial industry speculation is aimed at NSN, whose numbers seemed to show more product sales erosion than others in the market. At NSN’s analyst event, there was a sense that professional services were the name of the game, though of course they could never sustain a business of that size. Furthermore, nobody knows how much of the professional services business NSN could get without a strong equipment base. In short, NSN needs to sell gear.

The Nortel stuff would bring them a much better North American presence, one of the problems NSN is contending with. It may collide with the Juniper/NSN joint venture, however, enough to reduce its overall value. We don’t think NSN could up the Ciena bid more than about $250 million without paying so much the Street would trash its stock. We also wonder whether more low-OSI-layer assets will really help.

Our feeling: leave Nortel alone.

Juniper service-layer middleware: Get the latest report

We have completed a full report on the critical service-layer middleware announced October 29th by Juniper Networks, called Junos Space. The report is free; Download it now.

Juniper/NSN joint venture and the LTE connection

Cries that Juniper must now match Cisco and Tellabs and buy a mobile-core player are ignoring a critical reality — and it’s not that Juniper’s new superchip can make its universal edge portfolio into an Enhanced Packet Core box (though it can).

The real issue with wireless, guys, is that you need a radio network. Through its close relationship with NSN (including metro, which after all is the “core” of Enhanced Packet Core, through its joint venture), Juniper has direct linkage with the radio network. NSN and Juniper actually make a pretty credible total mobile solution provider, stronger than either Tellabs or Cisco, providing that they can make the joint venture work effectively in that light.

NSN also adds professional services, which virtually all LTE deals are likely to mandate. All of this, to us, means that the real question is whether the Juniper/NSN joint venture will work effectively. While both companies blow kisses at the joint venture in their public comments, we’re still waiting to see substantive cooperation emerge.

Juniper’s radical service-layer software and semiconductor architecture speaks to carriers and enterprises

We can’t apologize for the characterization here; Juniper announced a radical combination of an extensive service-layer software system and a new semiconductor architecture, taking the most profound step the company has taken since it was founded.

The new chip is a family, the first member of which is Trio. It is based on a “Network Instruction Set Processor” model that builds software on the device using instructions customized for network behavior control rather than general-purpose instructions, as NPs do. 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).

The software (Junos Space) is centered on a complete restructuring of the Juniper Junos operating system, and it extends Junos to cover not only Juniper devices but also independent software development, and even a new device client (Junos Pulse) that will provide security and identity management, VPN control, and connection control.

The software side of the announcement is the most critical because it is based on middleware to create what is, in effect, a platform-as-a-service cloud on which operators can build service features and service management components.The software there can then leverage software running on the routers through the old Juniper PSDP program, and through that could even, in theory, be linked to special “primitives” programmed into the new Trio NISP chip.

From a selfish vendor perspective, the most important thing is that Juniper ties the service layer development downward into its devices (through its router development programs like the old PSDP) and even potentially down into the chips themselves. That creates a value circle for them and it also lets operators build differentiation by linking their service solutions tightly into the network, giving better integration, operations, and performance than OTT players could achieve.

Juniper released applications for Ethernet activation, surveillance and monitoring, and problem management in the network. These are built on the Junos Space architecture. This new model is so radical that frankly it’s hard to believe it came out of Juniper, never known either for software or for making game-changing moves. This is clearly one such move, though, because it will at the minimum catalyze the whole service-layer marketplace.

Juniper also announced an expansion of its IBM OEM deal to include the SRX, which offers security control and falls under the Junos Space software umbrella at least in a development sense.

Finally, BLADE Network Technology announced it would license Junos for blade server switches, possibly the first porting of a network OS to another platform. Just assimilating all of this will no doubt create some headaches, but early indications from operators suggest they’re very interested, and there is also surprising early interest among large enterprises, particularly in the cloud computing potential.

Juniper/Dell OEM deal validates rising IT power in the data center

Juniper has announced an OEM deal with Dell that will have the latter re-skinning the MX, EX, and SRX products and offering them as a part of the Dell PowerConnect brand. The deal is a validation of the truth we articulated this time last year: Data center IT is now powering data center networking from an enterprise political perspective.

That means network vendors need an IT hook, and Dell offers Juniper another one (Juniper has a deal with IBM). One interesting slant on this is that Dell has other deals with Cisco and Brocade, and both of those make sense given the strong position those companies have in data center and storage networking. But Juniper is a relative up-and-coming.

Since Juniper made a big deal of its Stratus fabric for the data center at its analyst event in early spring, it may be that Dell sees Juniper as having a strengthening role. Juniper is also a leader in financial applications that require low latency, which is a sector every data center player is interested in. Dell and Juniper will also partner on Data Center Bridging, an extension to Ethernet that provides the lossless transfer that’s needed for data center storage and virtualization applications. DCB is also something that some operators are looking at as a cloud data center service.

Cisco’s Starent acquisition could be LTE procurement zone play

Cisco wrote another big check, this time to acquire Starent, a major player in the mobile/LTE space. And with the move, it may have leapfrogged a number of competitors. Starent and Cisco were somewhat competing previously, and Wall Street reports that it expected Juniper to announce a partnership with Starent that would have played in the AT&T procurement zone for mobile IP. Motorola was also a Starent partner, and to the extent that either of these deals was meaningful, they now have to be re-evaluated.

What may be most significant here is the procurement zone angle, in fact. Since we’re hearing that network operators worldwide are moving to a zone strategy, the acquisition of critical product mass in key zones is now vital for vendors. Cisco’s move signals an M&A wave to pluck up key components, since it’s now clear that major players will acquire vendors and thus kill simple partnership agreements.

The move will solidify a truth that’s been pretty visible for the last six months: LTE is where most investment focus will be in 2010 through 2012, so having a strong position there will be critical. LTE will accelerate disintermediation of operators, however, unless it’s coupled with a rational service-layer strategy.

Juniper and IBM Ethernet OEM deal focuses on data center

Juniper and IBM have announced an OEM arrangement that will allow IBM to label and sell Juniper’s Ethernet products designed for the data center. The pact covers selected models in the EX and MX lines and is similar to the deal already signed by IBM with Brocade.

The news is very good for Juniper because data center networking is an area where budget constraints are minimal this year and are expected to be even more so in 2010. The Cisco decision to sell blade servers has put Cisco in increased competition with IBM and HP. It’s also true that HP’s switch success worries IBM as much as it worries Cisco. Juniper now has a solid partnership in the enterprise, as it already has in carrier Ethernet with its NSN joint venture.

Juniper/NYSE join forces on data center design

Juniper and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced a joint project to create a new ultra-low-latency data center design that the exchange will deploy in both its NYC metro and London metro data centers. This deal will be converting to Juniper’s new data center Stratus fabric in the future, to achieve a next-level flattening of the connection structure and further reduce latency.

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Cisco’s blade server market entry: Can it work?

Cisco is expected to launch its blade server project “California” today, and there is a lot of disagreement over just what’s coming. Some predict Cisco will enter the data center server market with a hardware product linked to its network virtualization tools. Others think the product will be more Unified-Communications-flavored.

The view that Cisco is getting into the blade server market has been refuted by some Cisco management comments (which doesn’t mean it’s not true, of course), and we believe it would be a major strategic error for Cisco to jump into the data center server market. Cisco will collide with major players like IBM and HP, and the company doesn’t call on IT buyers today.

We’re more inclined to see Cisco going after a different kind of server, something much more like a service delivery platform (SDP). SDP products have existed for a decade, but they’ve been hamstrung by a rather myopic voice focus. Cisco has a chance to create a vision of an SDP that’s focused on voice only as an element of unified communications and collaboration, but that earns its stripes in a value sense by what it can do for non-voice services.

We also believe that Cisco is looking at initiatives like Juniper’s JCS1200 and HP’s ProCurve, the former of which is a product that essentially offloads router control planes to external servers, and the latter is a means of binding applications more tightly to networks (one yet to be truly proven, we’d have to say).

The net of this is that there is clearly a mission for servers to host features and even network control behavior, and this space is pretty vacant at the moment. It’s not going to stay that way, whatever Cisco does with California.

Juniper focuses on preparing for economic upturn

Juniper’s analyst event was a tour de force by any standard, and especially good for a company that has had problems communicating its value proposition in this kind of forum. Juniper related its position with confidence, made effective stories of its new programs and projects, showed empathy with the financial crisis but not paralysis by it, and in all, did everything it needed to do.

Juniper’s most significant utterances on the main day with financial analysts present, were focused around a new Network Instruction Set Processor (NISP) and the Stratus Fabric, Juniper’s new architecture for the data center. Juniper presented the new-gen NISP as a quantum leap in performance, a shift that will characterize the new generation of Juniper routing/switching products. Stratus is a concept and not yet a product, so there was no detail, but it seems clear that it is a new interconnect fabric designed to interface with but move beyond such familiar datacenter architectures as FiberChannel and Infiniband.

Juniper clearly realizes that the data center, cloud computing, virtualization, and other trends are all bring increased focus on how networks and computer resources couple among themselves. The timing of Juniper’s revelation, which promises quantum leaps in performance and latency, suggest that Juniper is deliberately moving to de-position Cisco’s incumbency and its aggressive goals in this space. It’s not clear whether the new NISP is part of Stratus, though it seems logical it would be.

Juniper also announced expansions to two product families, SRX and EX, taking both lines to a lower-end model group. In all, Juniper has made it clear that it is not surrendering to market conditions and will continue to move into new areas to prepare for the upturn.