On 1/9/24 10:55, Saku Ytti via juniper-nsp wrote:
What do we think of HPE acquiring JNPR?
I guess it was given that something's gotta give, JNPR has lost to
dollar as an investment for more than 2 decades, which is not
sustainable in the way we model our economy.
Out of all possible outcomes:
- JNPR suddenly starts to grow (how?)
- JNPR defaults
- JNPR gets acquired
It's not the worst outcome, and from who acquires them, HPE isn't the
worst option, nor the best. I guess the best option would have been,
several large telcos buying it through a co-owned sister company, who
then are less interested in profits, and more interested in having a
device that works for them. Worst would probably have been Cisco,
Nokia, Huawei.
I think the main concern is that SP business is kinda shitty business,
long sales times, low sales volumes, high requirements. But that's
also the side of JNPR that has USP.
What is the future of NPU (Trio) and Pipeline (Paradise/Triton), why
would I, as HP exec, keep them alive? I need JNPR to put QFX in my DC
RFPs, I don't really care about SP markets, and I can realise some
savings by axing chip design and support. I think Trio is the best NPU
on the market, and I think we may have a real risk losing it, and no
mechanism that would guarantee new players surfacing to replace it.
I do wish that JNPR had been more serious about how unsustainable it
is to lose to the dollar, and had tried more to capture markets. I
always suggested why not try Trio-PCI in newegg. Long tail is long,
maybe if you could buy it for 2-3k, there would be a new market of
Linux PCI users who want wire rate programmable features for multiple
ports? Maybe ESXi server integration for various pre-VPC protection
features at wire-rate? I think there might be a lot of potential in
NPU-PCI, perhaps even FAB-PCI, to have more ports than single NPU-PCI.
HP could do what Geely did for Volvo - give them cash, leave them alone,
but force them to wake up and get into the real world.
I don't think HP can match Juniper intellectually in the networking
space, so perhaps they add another sort of credibility to Juniper, as
long as Juniper realize that they need to get cleverer at staying in
business than just being technically smart.
I am concerned that if we lose Trio, it would be the end of half-decent
line-rate networking, which would level the playing field around
Broadcom... good for them, but perhaps not so great for operators. On
the other hand, as you say, the ISP business is in a terrible place
right now, and not looking to get any better as the core of the Internet
continues to be owned by a small % of the content crew.
And then there was this, hehe:
https://hpjuniper.com/en/signature-gin/
Hehe.
Mark.
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