We continue to see major vendor announcements on SDN, but obviously some are more responsive/revolutionary than others. Juniper has announced its EX9200 product, which it’s billing as a programmable core switch and also a stepping-stone toward SDN. There may be some significant news here, but it’s not on the SDN front—at least not for now.
The new switch is firmly aimed at the enterprise, at data center and campus applications, which is a bit of a change for Juniper in itself. It’s very likely that this positioning comes as Juniper tries to rehab its enterprise business, something it had hoped to sell off. They’re also playing more to promote their alliance with IBM, who is really their draw for the enterprise according to my surveys. Juniper isn’t seen as a strategic partner by enterprise customers to the extent that IBM is, or Cisco. The big question here is whether there’s anything to this beyond simple opportunism in the enterprise space, either by design or by accident.
Juniper has a data center switch—QFabric. It would be logical to say that a campus/data center strategy would build on that product and extend it across campus and metro scale, but that’s not what’s happening. Instead, it really looks like what Juniper is doing is admitting that the fabric opportunity isn’t nearly as large as they’d hoped, and that QFabric isn’t as revolutionary as they said it was when it was announced. Thus, the EX9200 may be Juniper’s attempt to wrestle some data center market share from rivals like Cisco, market share that QFabric simply isn’t going to claim.
An interesting wrinkle in this is that QFabric was the flagship product for Juniper’s then-new Juniper One chip, which has the interesting capability of being micro-programmable to enhance hardware support for new protocols. I think the chip is a good idea, but it never went into QFabric (which uses merchant silicon). Now it’s going into the EX9200, and it’s hard not to believe that this spells the strategic doom of the whole QFabric concept.
Juniper never had a shot of doing what it wanted to do with QFabric, but it does have a chance with the EX9200. I emphasize the “chance” part because the opportunity for the product is based not on glitzy (if retread) technology but on changes in the market. If there is a driver to data center change, it’s the concept of the cloud and the trend toward point-of-activity empowerment. Juniper does provide a software-based WLAN controller hosted in the EX9200, but they don’t really spend any time in their positioning explaining why that matters, other than to cite the already-boring BYOD trend. Where they focus most of their launch effort is on cost management. There is absolutely no top-line benefit claim made for the EX9200, only the same old TCO-and-cost-defense stuff that Juniper has been stuck on for years.
The enterprise is changing. Service providers are changing. Both are changing because of the new fusion of IT and networking, the evolution of both to become not separate disciplines but facets of one technology. This trend dates back over a decade and it’s emerged as the driver of everything. What we call “the cloud” is simply a manifestation of that broader trend. Juniper’s rival Cisco has a leg up on everyone in the network space because they have servers and so can help shape the trend from both the IT and network side. Those who, like Juniper, don’t have that asset set have to do something truly phenomenal at the boundary. Junos Space and the Network Director management console isn’t that “something”. Does this new thing offer APIs for software control? If so, why isn’t that a focus of the announcement. If not, then where is the link to justify a claim of SDN support?
Juniper was getting trashed pre-market this morning, probably in part because rival F5 issued poor guidance and in part because that triggered a downgrade of similar players. That’s fair because I think that if you look at these two companies you see a common thread—a smaller player in a giant’s market who is unwilling to make the big and daring moves that will erase what is otherwise a slow but inevitable decline. Juniper is still defending the network past, as rivals like Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent try to shape networking’s future. That is a position that a major incumbent might survive, but it’s not one for a relatively small player to take. Even Alcatel-Lucent knows this is the time to step up and swing for the seats, as they did with their SDN story this week. Juniper also has an SDN spin-in, but where is its contribution? Maybe if you added Contrail to the EX9200 you’d have something.
Juniper could make something of the EX9200 if they had a coherent SDN strategy that started up at the software layer and moved in an organized way through the network. They actually have most of the pieces, but they don’t seem to have the direction. Is this a management problem, as Motley Fool has suggested? Is it just too many router types who don’t want to give up on the glory days? It doesn’t matter. What matters to Juniper is fixing their strategy, and the Alcatel-Lucent SDN announcement shows that there’s precious little time to do that.