Juniper courts Meru for enterprise wireless / VoIP play

Juniper Networks last week said it is teaming with Meru Networks, a Wi-Fi VoIP gear maker, to offer joint product packages to corporate users.

Meru is joining Juniper's third-party sales and support service, the J-Partner Infrastructure Alliance. The two vendors will sell Juniper's enterprise firewall, routing and security along with Meru's wireless LAN access points, which are geared toward supporting VoIP over WLANs.

Meru makes WLAN gear that is aimed at latency-sensitive traffic requiring fast handoffs among access points, such as voice-over-WLAN. Its Air Traffic Control gear provides QoS for radio frequency signals in the air, prioritizing VoIP signals, while allowing large concentrations of voice connections on an access point.

Juniper, which is strong in carrier routing, as well as enterprise firewall and security (thanks to its 2004 purchase of NetScreen), has been trying to break into enterprise routing with the introduction of its J-Series WAN routers for corporate branch offices and larger sites.

The vendor, long a thorn in Cisco's side in the carrier market, also is trying to expand its enterprise presence in enterprise application acceleration, with buyouts of traffic optimizer firms RedLine Networks and Perabit Networks earlier this year, spending $469 million on the two companies.

Getting closer to Meru gives Juniper more pieces to the corporate network it appears to covet - VoIP and Wi-Fi technologies. Earlier this year, rumors swirled that Juniper might purchase a wireless-LAN company, possibly Trapeze Networks or Aruba Wireless Networks, to counter Cisco's Airespace WLAN buy in January. The vendor has been quiet since.

Juniper and IP PBX/phone maker Avaya agreed in May to co-market and develop gear for enterprises. In March, Juniper bought carrier VoIP gear marker Kagoor Networks for $67.5 million for the company's session border control products.