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.

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    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

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

acgcc.com 

Partnering or Vendor Outsourcing: Speed Your Time to Market

All major vendors offer some limited to complete outsourcing capabilities in either advanced services or outsourcing of management of the network operations center. The goal of outsourcing is to allow a provider to focus on other priorities like; customer acquisition, increase value to customers and deliver value add services such as cloud computing or other up-sell services.

Service providers are either true telco or a carrier and tend to be very slow to move to a new technology or offerings potentially missing inflections in the market. Their internal silos and sales teams are set up to sell connectivity and access and less able to sell the advanced offers, such as unified communications, cloud offers and video services, demanded by the market.

• ACG Research investigated nine companies with unique profiles and ranked them on their ability to address key factors:

• Communication and Unified Communication: Offers which build on connectivity and take IP communications and convergence to the next level.

• Technology Portfolio: Virtualization end-to-end portfolio and technology that creates value and customer stickiness.

• Multivendor: Capabilities to address service providers’ environment to deal with outsourcing all or part of their infrastructures.

• Connectivity Capability: Knowing what the outsourcer’s capability is in providing robust connectivity to meet demands of providers as a customer.

• Customer Service: The ability to create value for on demand, on time resolution and coverage in the markets the providers do business.

• Change Management: What are the processes to change the current do-it-yourself in-house provider IT to outsourcing or out-tasking parts of the network? Does the outsourcer have change management processes tuned to carriers?

• SP Specific Offers: The outsourcer’s ability to have a dedicated team and tune multitenancy offers to handle the environment of the providers.

• System Integration Skills: The ability for the outsourcer to offer system integration to customers of the providers or to the provider to address gaps in migrating a customer or provider to a virtualized infrastructure or process.

• System Integration Experience: What use cases and customer lists can the outsourcer cite?

• Cloud Vision: What is the outsourcer’s ability to outline the cloud reference architecture and deliver technology, thought leadership and understanding of the provider’s cloud opportunity?

• Cloud Experience: In looking to an outsourcer for quick time to market there are requirements that dictate that the outsourcer has done this before and in many instances. What use cases can the outsourcer cite?

Our Outsourcing report covers the following: Cisco, HP, IBM, Globecomm, Avaya, CSC, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and NSN. For more information about this document contact ACG Research at sales@acgresearch.net.

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Lauren Robinette
lrobinette@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch.net

Cloud Strategy Face Off

IBM, HP and Cisco discuss their cloud strategies with ACG Research’s analysts. How do they measure up?

Service provider (SP) companies have three choices for cloud enablement for their infrastructures: 1) Use vendors that support them with full end-to-end management of their networks; 2) base their own networks on vendors’ technologies; 3) or use a combination of both. However, before deciding on which option best supports their business models, SPs need to consider:

• Which companies offer services for cloud enablement that target SPs who may already have NOC investments?
• Which companies offer full cloud offers SPs can leverage in end-to-end support on their Cloud offers?
• What do providers need to know to migrate to cloud?
  

ACG Research reviewed the cloud enablement strategies of IBM, HP and Cisco and details what these companies offer, the benefits and challenges of their products/services and what service providers can do to ensure successful migration to cloud.

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Lauren Robinette
lrobinette@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch.net