Juniper Exits App Acceleration Business


Make no mistake about it, the application acceleration business is a tough
one. Case in point: Networking vendor Juniper Networks has
decided to discontinue its key DX application acceleration product line.

A company spokesperson confirmed the decision but didn’t answer any direct questions about the move.


“The strength of Juniper is based on the competitive advantage that we bring
to the market, coupled with the increasing critical nature of high-performance
networking to our customer’s business success,” Juniper spokesperson Sarah
Sorensen said in an e-mail comment for InternetNews.com. “Our ability to
deliver sustained differentiation is the nexus of the opportunity in front
of us and this is what defines us. We remain fully committed to capitalizing
on this opportunity.”

Although Juniper is terminating
the DX line, it’s not necessarily exiting the acceleration business
altogether. However, Juniper has decided to end-of-life the DX hardware, software and
licenses.

In past years, Juniper had boasted about high profile
deployments of its DX gear, including a large deployment at Dow Corning. In
December of 2007, Juniper announced that its DX platform had been certified
for SAP’s NetWeaver platform.


The technology behind Juniper’s DX product line came by way of the 2005 acquisition
of Redline Networks for $132 million
.

So what happened?
The application acceleration business is extremely competitive. The revelation that Juniper is
ending its DX product line comes as Cisco has just announced a new set of
products as part of its
Application Delivery Network strategy
.


Though the DX line is now kaput, Juniper isn’t abandoning its current DX customers.


“We will work diligently to continue to support existing customer
installations of the DX and successfully work to transition customers to
other application acceleration products within our high-performance network
infrastructure offerings,” Sorensen wrote. “And with more than 400 currently
open positions at Juniper, every effort is being made to identify new roles
for all employees affected by this decision. ”


In recent months, Juniper has updated the
other part of its acceleration portfolio, the WX product line
, which had
originally been positioned as a WAN optimization solution. It is not yet
clear whether Juniper will be integrating the capabilities of the DX
into its WX product line.


“At Juniper, our cornerstone principle of putting employees first and
investing in their success continues to correlate directly to the success of
our company,” Juniper’s Sorenson wrote. “In a business
environment of constant change, we maintain a relentless commitment to
execution and serving the high-performance networking requirements of our
customers.”


At least one Juniper competitor in the application acceleration market sees
Juniper’s move to end the DX as being unexpected


“We really haven’t seen Juniper gain much success in the market with the
product since then {the 2005 acquisition},” Dan Matte SVP of Marketing at F5
wrote in a blog post. “However, its decision to exit the business is
still a bit of a surprise.”

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