* Juniper dreams of unifying enterprise networks
Juniper waded into the enterprise LAN switching ocean this week, introducing a line of switches – and mouthing a line about how much enterprise customers care about the operating system in the switch.
That’s the rationale for getting into a market that is widely considered mature and dominated by Cisco. If you bring up those points, Juniper will tell you – specifically, CEO Scott Kriens will tell you – that people said the same thing 10 years ago when Juniper was a young startup looking to make it big in the router market.
Juniper made a significant impact on that market, and it believes it can do so again with enterprise LAN switching. It is so confident in its own abilities that it did all its development in-house, rather than go out and buy one of the several smaller enterprise LAN switching companies available.
Kriens, in his interview with Network World’s Jim Duffy and John Gallant, insisted that the operating system – JUNOS, in this case – is the key to the whole puzzle. He said that “network services” are what are driving the market now, not speeds and feeds. And if that’s the case, then the network services rely on the operating system, and it is a good thing to have the same operating system running in your switches and your routers – the whole enchilada.
The premise seems to be that you would fill your network with all Juniper gear – in the data center, in the enterprise campus, and in the wide area.
Maybe there are plenty of companies that want to commit to a single vendor. But isn’t the use of multiple vendors also healthy? Isn’t that why we have standards? Or is it kidding myself to think that there are companies that prefer to use different vendors’ products in different parts of their network these days?
