[j-nsp] Thanks for all the fish

[Mark Tinka]

On 1/11/24 02:56, Chris Kawchuk via juniper-nsp wrote:

> Shall we start taking bets on what stays, and what goes?

I'm glad that Rami gets to stay as CEO for the networking side of 
things. Good lad, that...
> Again, ACX was never a competitor to the ASR920 which I know Mr Tinka was very fond of. And the NCS540 "is the new ASR920”. There’s some long roads ahead for JNPR to wrestle back some of that marketshare.

The whole Metro-E industry is currently a balls-up. All vendors seem to 
have met at a secret location that served 20-year old wine and agreed 
not to pursue any Metro-E platforms built around custom silicon.

So really, what you are buying from either Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, Arista 
or Arrcus will be code maturity. No other differentiator.

> ACX also did a ‘reboot’ of the product line in the 7000-series when they went Jericho, versus ACX5000 which (correct me if I’m wrong) that was QFX/Trident/Trident+ based and earlier ACX series which were $no-idea-i-didnt-look-very-hard-at-them…. so its almost “a new product” which may not have a lot of customer nor market traction; thus easier to kill off. Yes — even though previous generations of ACX did exist and likely had some customers..somewhere…., I know of absolutely nobody that bought them nor used them in anger for a large Metro-E/MPLS/eVPN/SR network role.
>
> I'm happy to be proven wrong on ACX; as I don’t like the idea of handing an entire market segment to a single vendor.

I am aware of a few major orders of the ACX7024 that Juniper are working 
on. Of course, none of it will become materially evidential until the 
end of 2024. That said, I think HP will give the box a chance, as there 
is a market for it. They might just put a time line on it.

And for once in Juniper's history, they are beginning to take the 
Metro-E network a little seriously, although probably a tad later than 
they should have.

Mark.