[j-nsp] Thanks for all the fish

[Roger Wiklund]

Not the first rumour of Juniper getting acquired. Last time it was Ericsson
and before that I think it was IBM or EMC, but perhaps this time it's the
real deal.

Juniper has been very successful in Enterprise with the Mist acquisition,
so I'm a bit surprised that the stock price is still stale.
Perhaps there's not enough money there or it's too little too late.

I wonder how they would merge Mist and Aruba, the top wifi players on the
market. Usually you acquire a company to fill a gap in the portfolio. But
perhaps that's primarily done for Junipers routing/dc/switching stuff then.

Yeah the ISP business is no fun, I feel like everyone secretly wishes they
can start buying Huawei again, It seems it's all about the lowest price per
100G/400G port.

/Roger

On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 10:19 AM Mark Tinka via juniper-nsp <
juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net> wrote:

>
>
> On 1/9/24 10:55, Saku Ytti via juniper-nsp wrote:
> > What do we think of HPE acquiring JNPR?
> >
> >
> > I guess it was given that something's gotta give, JNPR has lost to
> > dollar as an investment for more than 2 decades, which is not
> > sustainable in the way we model our economy.
> >
> > Out of all possible outcomes:
> >     - JNPR suddenly starts to grow (how?)
> >     - JNPR defaults
> >     - JNPR gets acquired
> >
> > It's not the worst outcome, and from who acquires them, HPE isn't the
> > worst option, nor the best. I guess the best option would have been,
> > several large telcos buying it through a co-owned sister company, who
> > then are less interested in profits, and more interested in having a
> > device that works for them. Worst would probably have been Cisco,
> > Nokia, Huawei.
> >
> > I think the main concern is that SP business is kinda shitty business,
> > long sales times, low sales volumes, high requirements. But that's
> > also the side of JNPR that has USP.
> >
> > What is the future of NPU (Trio) and Pipeline (Paradise/Triton), why
> > would I, as HP exec, keep them alive? I need JNPR to put QFX in my DC
> > RFPs, I don't really care about SP markets, and I can realise some
> > savings by axing chip design and support. I think Trio is the best NPU
> > on the market, and I think we may have a real risk losing it, and no
> > mechanism that would guarantee new players surfacing to replace it.
> >
> > I do wish that JNPR had been more serious about how unsustainable it
> > is to lose to the dollar, and had tried more to capture markets. I
> > always suggested why not try Trio-PCI in newegg. Long tail is long,
> > maybe if you could buy it for 2-3k, there would be a new market of
> > Linux PCI users who want wire rate programmable features for multiple
> > ports? Maybe ESXi server integration for various pre-VPC protection
> > features at wire-rate? I think there might be a lot of potential in
> > NPU-PCI, perhaps even FAB-PCI, to have more ports than single NPU-PCI.
>
> HP could do what Geely did for Volvo - give them cash, leave them alone,
> but force them to wake up and get into the real world.
>
> I don't think HP can match Juniper intellectually in the networking
> space, so perhaps they add another sort of credibility to Juniper, as
> long as Juniper realize that they need to get cleverer at staying in
> business than just being technically smart.
>
> I am concerned that if we lose Trio, it would be the end of half-decent
> line-rate networking, which would level the playing field around
> Broadcom... good for them, but perhaps not so great for operators. On
> the other hand, as you say, the ISP business is in a terrible place
> right now, and not looking to get any better as the core of the Internet
> continues to be owned by a small % of the content crew.
>
> And then there was this, hehe:
>
>      https://hpjuniper.com/en/signature-gin/
>
> Hehe.
>
> Mark.
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