In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Dear Vorticians,

At this week's Interop in Las Vegas, the CEO of one tech company told me the conference felt "like the Juniper-Cisco show." It was an apt description.

The show floor was buzzing with conversation and speculation about Juniper's intentions in the enterprise IT market and what Juniper's moves will ultimately mean for Cisco and its customers. The dialogue was fueled in large part by the company's double acquisition the previous week of Peribit and Redline Networks. Executives from other network companies wanted to share views on how the deals will affect their market slices ("this really validates our space," was the typical defensive response) and to predict what other pieces of the portfolio Juniper would fill in next. Will it be a switching company? Something in the wireless space? More security?

About the next acquisition, Juniper isn't talking. Company executives told me that the focus is on "their core excellence," which is in solving "really complex problems." Such problems include advanced routing - where the company has its roots - security, which the company began to address through its earlier acquisition of NetScreen, and application assurance. The latter refers to improving and accelerating application performance and is the rationale behind the acquisition of Redline, which offers so-called application front-end technology for Web apps, and Peribit, with its WAN optimization tools.

That "really complex problems" and "core excellence" stuff sounds good, but what Juniper is undertaking is a classic flanking maneuver familiar to anyone who's studied military tactics.

Juniper already owns a big piece of the service provider market and it's now greedily eyeballing the big enterprise network space that Cisco has had pretty much to itself for several years. But, as any strategist would tell you, you never attack your enemy at his strongest point. You hit the enemy's flank, finding gaps to penetrate, then encircle. Cisco's stronghold is in enterprise switching, where it commands a ridiculously large market share. So, Juniper is moving up the computing stack, tackling problems beyond Layers 2 and 3 where Cisco isn't as powerful.