Your take on Juniper acquiring Netscreen

[Boscoh]

Juniper would be wise to not screw this up and leverage everything that Netscreen gives them. In my opinion, this gives them a great opportunity to expand out of the service provider arena. With Netscreen, they have some of the tools they need to move into the Large/Medium business area, big time.

I also think this deal needs to make Cisco wake up and realize they arent the biggest, baddest kid on the block anymore. They have someone with the jewels big enough to take them on in their neighborhood and hit them where it hurts now. Hopefully we'll start seeing some price wars out of this and the prices will drop a little bit.

If Cisco was wise, they'd see that Intrusion Prevention is going to be a big thing that Juniper/Netscreen can offer along with the rest of their "full package" that Cisco can't. Tipping Point sure does look like a good acquisition in my eyes to remedy this problem for Cisco. What do you guys think?

Any of you guys in the large enterprises or service providers work with Cisco AND Juniper equipment? What do you think about one over the other? I've never worked with Juniper stuff, but I've heard a lot of great stuff about thier products. I'd be interested to know what some people who work with both manufacturers think.

 

[cmetz]

Juniper desperately needs to move into the enterprise market. So far, their efforts to do so have failed miserably. I think that's a part of this play - enterprise sales & marketing, product presence, etc.

Juniper did well with the Unisphere acquisition. There were some quarters where the formerly-Unisphere SMS generated more revenue than the Martini carrier routers. Hopefully they will handle this acquisition as well.

Juniper has very well engineered products in the Martini and Tera routers. The Unisphere products I don't know about either way. I've worked with Netscreen products before and think they suck (product wise and support wise) but they are well regarded by the market. My main concern with Juniper is that they started out as a company with really excellent engineering, and as they acquire companies, they need to ensure that they keep that rep. If they end up offerring products that are as expensive and underengineered as Cisco does, without the Cisco sales & marketing and brand reputation, they're going to continue having difficulty in the enterprise marketplace.