EMC in bizarre Juniper gobble attempt - Wall Street whispers Reports say that data networking supplier Juniper Networks is putting itself up for sale and EMC could be a buyer. Benzinga, a financial website, reported a rumour this week that Juniper was shopping itself around, with banker JP Morgan hired to deal with bids from potential buyers, such as EMC. A bid in the high twenties was …
Agree, I am not sure that EMC is going to buy Juniper, but the Cisco partnership is definitely coming to an end. EMC through VMware through Nicira is Cisco's largest threat. They are going to be going after each other in future years. I am sure all of those people who invested in VBlock are sweating it. They should not have been so sure that a partnership between EMC and Cisco would last for long. If Juniper falls another 20% or so, which is very possible, I could see someone stepping in to buy them. It would either be IBM or EMC... or, really outside chance, Oracle.
a complete solution to survive. The article is very right that VMWare will start losing ground here shortly because there is a savage onslaught from Microsoft and others, and the converged solutions leave EMC on the outside looking in. It will be very hard to sell against converged stacks in a couple of years. No stack, no competitive position. And they know it.
Makes sense, the whole idea that they are going to be pitching with Nicira is that the network OS doesn't matter. Junos doesn't help them at all with Nicira. Cisco and EMC are massing troops at each other borders at the moment. Cisco is now best friends with NetApp. EMC is starting to work with Lenovo, of all companies, but I suppose they are the only server vendor, sort of server vendor, without a storage business.
So on its own, maybe it doesn't appear to make sense.
However I have heard a similar rumour (from a source I trust to have just enough credibility) of Cisco also wanting to broaden its horizons. How can it do that? We there are other virtual platforms out there. Clearly they're not going to get VMWare off EMC, nor are they going to get HyperV off Microsoft. But next in the Magic Quadrants is Citrix.
Suddenly you can see very good reasons for EMC to own a network company.
There's no way EMC is going to spend $14bn to be able to say 'they can do the whole stack'. They could do it but it would mean they couldn't do any real acquisitions for many years. Just in the same way there is no way Cisco is going to spend $15nb to be able to do storage (buying Netapp).
Partnering is fine and accepted but if these guys DID want to do the whole stack they would be buying the little players between $1-3bn which would leave plenty of change.
Buying up a small player, throwing $2bn into R&D and then throwing huge sales forces behind the products are the way forwards (see HP & 3PAR, Dell & Compellent, EMC & Isilon).
I agree with the majority of opinions here about EMC buying Juniper and also agree with the comments about Juniper's current situation and market presence. However, no smoke without fire and all that, I would suggest that there may be more mileage in the EMC gobbling up Brocade idea as this really does give EMC a differentiator as only Brocade brings the FC SAN part (aka Storage @EMC) and the properly converged roadmap that ONLY Brocade and Cisco can currently trumpet. What Brocade also brings to the is a very smart set of Ethernet products, especially at the high end with the MLXe and the new big box as well as commodity 10gb/E switches for edge connectivity that will serve the iscsi/low end connectivity requirements. As far as the current OEMs getting feisty about this, EMC have done a pretty good job of keeping VMWare separate so why not the Brocade SAN part? It is a pretty much self sufficient business unit and Brocade are so far ahead of Cisco now that they could almost take a two year R&D break and Cisco would still be in the distant rear view upon their return to work...........
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