Juniper and Ruckus: A Combination Sure to Shake Up the Unified Communications Market

This strategic alliance reinforces the inter-relatedness of the wireless market and portends disruption.

Juniper Networks, which has been looking for a unified communications solution for quite some time, recently announced its partnership with carrier/enterprise Wi-Fi hardware and software vendor Ruckus. The companies plan to offer solutions that pair Juniper’s EX Series Ethernet switches with Ruckus’ ZoneFlex Wi-Fi access points and SmartZone Wi-Fi management software to enterprise, government, and education clients. This alliance comes on the heels of another significant announcement: HP’s (Juniper Ethernet competitor) acquisition of Aruba Networks, which was Juniper’s partner since last year.

Juniper’s alliance with its interesting value proposition will pose significant competition to Cisco/Meraki and HP/Aruba and no doubt will shake up the expanding unified communications market. We believe that the Cisco/Meraki and HP/Aruba will maintain strengths as they do have extensive wired and wireless offerings but as Juniper puts down stakes we would anticipate some serious changes in market shares. The bottom line is that it’s all about innovation and positioning, for example, if Juniper can enhance the enterprise environment by introducing products that could lower the number of logical network devices that need to be managed by IT administrators that could result into a key advantage. Similar solutions could be attractive enough to disrupt the WiFi enterprise market and threaten the major vendors’ leadership.

We do see this partnership as one of many in broader enterprise access realignment (in parallel with Enterprise Small Cells market) with more to come this year and next. The enterprise and the indoor coverage and access markets have been a hot field lately with high promising revenues, on which undoubtedly Juniper wants to capitalize. This alliance is expected to pay bigger dividends in the service provider market where both companies see their strengths.

This next step for Juniper is extremely important as it joins this upcoming unified communications market in a “never too late” move. Perhaps market pressures, dynamics and the new strategic plan will force a severing of the Aruba relationship, which will most likely cease in the next six months or earlier. Time will tell.

Click for more information about Elias Aravantinos.

    

    Elias Aranvantino

    earanvantino@acgcc.com

    www.acgcc.com

1Q Worldwide Mobile Infrastructure Markets Driven by LTE

LTE-Advanced deployment is a major industry, voice over LTE activities and high interest in end-to-end VoLTE solutions is driving the mobility market

The Worldwide Mobile Infrastructure market decreased revenue in Q1 and year over year. The Q1 Total Worldwide Mobile Infrastructure market posted revenue of $87.4 billion. Although mobile broadband net sales were primarily driven by radio technologies, and specifically LTE, the market downturn is attributed to the Ericsson’s North America decline, as most operators have completed their LTE deployments. But it is anticipated that the fast-rising data traffic could eventually require further upgrades of U.S. wireless networks to LTE-Advanced, generating opportunities for vendors.

Mobile spending was flat in the quarter and is attributed to carriers in the phase of planning to prepare for new deployments and network upgrades. Current trials with the different forms of LTE could potentially slow down spending until MNOs are convinced of the added value they bring to the networks with carrier aggregation. 3G remains strong and continues to grow as developing economies upgrade and invest in this technology. Mobile infrastructure will continue to be a highly dynamic market for the next several years as vendors and carriers are getting ready to offer new technologies such as VoLTE, network function virtualization, small cells, Hotspot 2.0, millimeter wave backhaul and DAS. Vendors with a plurality of solutions will need to have solid strategies and execution plans in this demanding environment.

“It has been an interesting quarter as the LTE key revenues shifted from North America and EMEA to Asia, which is becoming a very vibrant market across all the mobile technologies because of the large deployments and tremendous demand for mobile data,” states Elias Aravantinos, principal analyst, ACG. “However, there is ongoing 5G preparation and services convergence trend across all leading operators. This trend will result in high-performance networks. Providers are trialing new LTE forms, NFV, and virtual services as well as addressing densification affecting the small cell market and creation of a new IP voice services that support VoWiFi and VoLTE as complementary services. This is expected to increase operators’ spending the coming years.”

TREND and DRIVER HIGHLIGHTS

• Network innovations will facilitate bandwidth increases by expanding the capacity of the access network, reducing service providers’ costs, and creating new incentives for subscribers to stay on-net. For example, the benefits of LTE-Advanced include optimized heterogeneous networks with a mix of macro cells and small cells to improve coverage and reduce costs and use of multicarrier to support higher data rates.

• LTE worldwide initiatives will remain strong by the end of 2015, driving the demand for mobile backhaul, evolved packet core, and edge routing solutions; however, there will be a decrease in the mobile backhaul business when LTE roll-outs end. In 1Q some vendors benefited from a second round of investments in LTE backhaul infrastructure to raise capacity for demand. LTE TDD is gaining traction, as the LTE-TDD mode with unpaired spectrum continues to develop in all growing regions, particularly in China. LTE-Advanced systems commercially launched in more than 30 countries, expected to double in 2015.

• Market is expected to grow as operators start implementing their plans, upgrading networks because of mobile data access pressure and the LTE subs explosion. Online video will add to this data pressure because more than two-thirds of the global mobile data traffic will be video by 2017. VoLTE service and its growing demand will require, mainly in APAC and North America, more Small Cells for better coverage. Global machine to machine will triple its revenue growth mainly from international businesses.

Click for more information about Elias Aravantinos.

    

    Elias Aranvantino

    earanvantino@acgcc.com

    www.acgcc.com

Reshaping System Architectures: Open at Every Turn?

Disaggregated, modular, mix and match, open, these are the sound bites of the emerging white box and open software ecosystems. Will they define the architectural thinking used throughout our information-driven world moving forward?

From the Open Compute Project in data center hardware to open source software such as Open Daylight and OpenStack, the principles of ‘don’t lock me in’ and ‘let me be in charge of components I need for my best-in-class solution’ are making a play for being the dominant drivers for solution designs in nearly every network and IT platform category.

Take Cavium’s just-announced XPliant family of terabit-scale Ethernet Data Center switches as a fresh example. Its Open Compute Project design foundation means, with OCP’s Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) the switches can be used by any open networking software team to build functions that suit their needs – without being held back by the underlying hardware’s processing architecture. And, with its Open Network Install Environment (ONIE), solution designers can decide whichever network OS best suits their needs. 

Mix and match, open, see http://www.cavium.com/newsevents-Cavium-XPliant-Ethernet-Switch-Supports-the-Emerging-Open-Ecosystems.html.

In another closely related category, look at Ericsson’s Hyperscale Data Center System (HDS 8000) introduced at Mobile World Congress last week. To support an array of cloud-scale workloads, Ericsson determined it makes sense for the processor and memory elements in its HDS server ‘sleds’ (individual units) to be mixable in a manner customers decide are optimal for their needs. Each combination can be made available to the larger ‘pool’ of resources available and allocated as desired by the cloud management system in use. Each module is attached via an optical infrastructure to simplify storage and compute integration, again based on the workload’s needs.

Mix and match, modular, see http://www.ericsson.com/spotlight/cloud.

Does this ultra-modular perspective mean the era of integrated product and solution deliveries is dead? Not completely. They will be less prominent in the long run but unlikely to go completely away. For example, HP delivers its Helion OpenStack cloud computing platform as a whole system offering for which it is accountable to its customers. It includes HP and open community components. Juniper delivers its OCX 1100 Open Networking Switch as a platform full of choices about the OS a customer chooses to use in its data center for which Juniper is accountable. It includes Juniper and open community components. 

The increased role of open and modular thinking in solution deliveries is just an indication that the range of ingredients available to producers is increasing (these options were not possible 10 years ago) and the opportunity to bring them to customers in creative ways have expanded. In that sense, the line defining for whom a solution integrator works—a ‘whole system’ vendor (Cisco, Ericsson, HP); a professional services firm (Accenture, Tata); or an end customer (DT, Equinix, NTT)—is being drawn more flexibly today (and moving to the future) than was possible a decade ago. Each party can decide the amount of responsibility it thinks it should shoulder in delivering the end result. The range of options has increased.

Like many deeply rooted transitions, there are parts of this one that are sometimes messy and a bit fragile compared with the ‘certainty’ that integrated platform deliveries of the past have offered. However that fragility will likely subside in coming years as integrators of every type get more familiar with the open building blocks with which they are working, and the use cases they’re supporting put their real and natural pressure on where the boundaries of responsibility should lie for the solutions to be practical. The outcome will be a downshift in the unit cost of underlying hardware, an uptick in the amount of choice that solution integrators decide to use in their designs, and a rise in the value of the software in the solutions at every stage of deployments—from network nodes to server units to higher level applications—that support the services we decide we want to use.

That transition will undoubtedly have its jarring and its stellar moments and will take some time to occur. In the meantime as it unfolds, it’s worth paying close attention to the shifts being brought to market in line with that trajectory in offerings such as the Cavium and Ericsson solutions highlighted here.

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Paul Parker-Johnson

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