IBM and Juniper in the cloud together
Francis Turner
February 10th, 2009
Recently it was revealed that Cisco was moving into the server space with virtualized offerings to compete with IBM, HP etc. It should come as no surprise that Juniper, its major networking rival, might be looking at something similar. Nor should it be surprising that IBM might like to find a networking partner to help it fight Cisco. Hence this TechCrunch article and this PCWorld story about IBM and Juniper working together in this field are more interesting for their vagueness than their existence.
IBM has more cloud and virtualization experience than any other company simply because many of the concepts used today were pioneered on IBM mainframes decades ago and its blue chip status and general air of reliability means that the trust issues about cloud computing are reduced. Hence IBM’s success in getting customers to sign up to its cloud computing initiatives.
The PC World article mentions IBM using Juniper APIs for network traffic engineering which doesn’t seem like a very strong tie. One suspects that IBM will be suggesting that henceforth its sales partners look at using Juniper rather than Cisco when asked to provide networking gear for the cloud.
