The network wars are heating up. Juniper Networks
Taking Trapeze off the hands of electrical equipment builder Belden
It's a large market, and Cisco is the 900-pound gorilla in the room. If Juniper can capture a larger slice of the $2.2 billion enterprise wireless networking market than Belden could, this might be the best $152 million Juniper ever spent. That's before accounting for the synergies created by having an end-to-end solution rather than just one piece of the puzzle. If IBM
Cisco took that lesson to heart and is now selling everything from server systems to consumer-level Wi-Fi routers, touching every point in between those extremes. Juniper is a much less complete conglomerate, but is working hard on its Cisco (and IBM) impersonation skills. At the moment, the underdog is growing faster than the gorilla. With a few strategic acquisitions along the way, such as this agile Trapeze move, I don't see why that trend would reverse over the next couple of years.
Watch out, Cisco -- Juniper is coming after your biggest customers. How do you plan to fight back?
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