Juniper's relationship with Packet Design

In our Oct. 26 WAN newsletter we discussed the fact that there were a number of rumors circulating about a dramatic move that Juniper would soon announce. On Oct. 29 Juniper used the New York stock exchange as a backdrop to make a series of announcements. We are going to use this newsletter to focus on one piece of the Juniper announcements – Juniper's establishment of a close relationship with Packet Design.

Juniper Networks: a brief history

In the Oct. 26 newsletter we pointed out that the most common rumor we were hearing was that Juniper would acquire Riverbed. In that newsletter we stated that for a number of reasons we didn't believe that Juniper would acquire Riverbed. We stated, for example, that although Riverbed certainly does sell into service providers, it is primarily a fast moving enterprise-focused company. In contrast, Juniper's DNA is clearly in the service-provider market.

Part of the agreement that Juniper announced with Packet Design is the standard OEM relationship by which Juniper's direct sales and distribution partners will sell Packet Design's route analytics products. As part of their announcement, however, Juniper also announced that it will offer a development platform referred to as Junos Space. Packet Design's Route Analyzer product will be one of the first solutions that resides in Junos Space.

Unlike the rumored acquisition of Riverbed, Juniper's recently announced relationship with Packet Design makes a lot of sense. That follows because Packet Design's route analytics product are targeted at some of the challenges that occur in large complex networks – both enterprise and service provider.

For example, one of the functions of Packet Design's route analytics products is to enable IT professionals to accurately model network changes before implementing them. Another function of these products is to provide visibility, analysis and diagnosis of the issues that occur at the routing layer. In order to do this, a route analytics solution has to have an understanding of precisely how IP networks deliver application traffic. This requires continuous, real-time monitoring as well as the creation and maintenance of a map of networkwide routes and of all the IP traffic flows that traverse these routes. This in turn means that a route analytics solution must be able to record every change in the traffic paths as controlled and notified by IP routing protocols.

We said that this relationship makes a lot of sense in part because networks are continually getting more complex, Packet Design's route analytics products help manage that complexity and Juniper definitely understands large complex networks.

The Juniper announcements are interesting in part because they show that in spite of appearances, that there is a lot of innovation happening in networking. To reinforce that concept, Packet Design will be on one of Jim's panels at the forthcoming Interop conference in New York. The panel is entitled "Breakthrough Network Technologies". If you are going to be at the conference, try to attend the panel as it should be very insightful.