So Juniper is throwing in the load balancing application acceleration towel saying that its DX line is "insufficiently distinguishable from competitors' devices," reports Tim Greene of Network 
World. The story cites Juniper as saying: "Our ability to deliver sustained differentiation is the nexus of the opportunity in front of us. We remain fully committed to capitalizing on this opportunity. To this end, Juniper has made the formal decision to end-of-life the DX hardware, software and licenses." DX competes with products from Array Networks, Citrix, Cresendo, F5, Foundry. Cisco is also in the load balancing application acceleration business with its Application Control Engine (ACE), a blade that slides into its Catalyst 6500 switches and performs several functions typically handled by load balancers, compression devices and application-acceleration devices.
Is Juniper dropping DX a sign of trouble in the load balancing corner of the market (and if so, how might this affect Cisco's ACE), or is this a problem specific to Juniper? In Tim's story, one customer said DX, which Juniper acquired from Redline Networks, never seemed integrated fully with Juniper's other products...
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This has everything to do
This has everything to do with Juniper's inability to execute and nothing to do with Cisco's ACE, which is selling very well. Juniper has no cross product integration. They tout JUNOS as a standard but they don't tell you about WXOS, DXOS and NetscreenOS. Every Juniper product runs a different OS. There has not been any cross product development or integration except for a feeble attempt to join SSG and J-Series which is barely half done after several years.
Re: ACE has a market differentiator.
We noticed that too, and wrote a story about it on NetworkPerformanceDaily.com (It's NetQoS's house-organ blog.)
I'll grant you that I'm not the most neutral of sources, but Cisco has integrated our NetQoS Performance Center into their ACE module (similar to integration of our software into their WAAS WAN Acceleration devices,) and we've got a number of different reasons that this helps ACE stand out in this field.
The main reason is that by including metrics with your devices, it's easier for IT guys and gals to make the business case to their managers and CIOs that the IT investment is improving the bottom line of the business. That's a powerful selling point.
-- Brian Boyko
-- Editor, NetworkPerformanceDaily.com
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