If Juniper announces its own switches today as expected, it could mean a big step for its NAC program, which Juniper calls Unified Access Control.

One of the notable aspects of UAC has been that Juniper sold no access switches of its own. UAC could use other vendors switches as enforcement points for UAC, but it had to be done via standards that didn’t support the most granular access controls.

Certain Juniper gear does enforce UAC, including its firewalls and VPN gateways, and the company has strongly embraced the Trusted Computing Group’s NAC standardization efforts, perhaps in part because it benefits from standards that allow its technology to use a broader set of enforcement points.

With switches designed from the ground up, Juniper may have built in processing power for them to be more intelligent than switches have been traditionally. They may include the ability to monitor user behavior and enforce policies about what they can access, for instance, along the lines of some startup vendors that build NAC capabilities into their own brand of access switches. (Learn more about NAC products from our Network Access Control Buyer's Guide)

If that is the route Juniper takes it may have more success than the startups because it has made inroads into business networks already with other gear.

The intelligence of switches is becoming more important to network security and QoS, and Juniper can join in only if it sells its own. Industry observers have noted this lack for years and repeatedly predicted the company would buy up a switch vendor to fill the gap.

Apparently Juniper has decided it made more sense to grow its own switching technology. Stay tuned for more details after Juniper’s announcement.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.