UPDATED 13:33 EDT / OCTOBER 22 2012

Juniper Networks Up for Grabs, EMC a Potential Buyer?

New reports suggest that Juniper Networks could be gearing up for a takeover by storage giant EMC.  The networking firm has had a series of troubled quarters, its stock suffering from a declining market.  It could very well be a good fit for EMC, considering the trend towards converged infrastructure.  Cisco’s been aggressively eyeing the storage space, finding new opportunity in the partner channel.

Juniper Networks is currently undergoing a round of layoffs that will trim its total workforce by 5 percent, about 500 personnel. The goal is to reduce expenses by $150 million but there may be more to it – management may be looking to make the company a more attractive acquisition target. This internal reshuffle, coupled by a fresh report that Juniper hired JP Morgan to handle potential offers, only support speculation of an EMC buyout.

It’s not hard to see why the vendor would want an exit. Juniper Networks is trailing behind in the networking space, faced with weakened demand from service providers: product sales dropped by more than 11 percent last quarter, and total revenue declined by nearly six. Juniper is currently trading at $17 a pop; a bid in the 20s would be very plausible.

The company is valued at nearly $10 billion today.  Only a handful of industry peers could afford the premium tag and even fewer would want to, but research firm ISI Group only has one name in mind.

The investment firm says that EMC may be interested in pursuing such a deal. VMware acquired Nicira for over a billion in July, and Juniper could be the asset the storage vendor needs to round out its networking portfolio across the board.  This is especially true in light of the company’s dependency on partnerships to support its cloud stack.

“With EMC/VMware and Cisco fracturing, picking up Juniper for data center switching and cloud service provider routing could credibly replace Cisco and fill out EMC’s one-stop storage/server/switching/virtualization IT and cloud fabric offering,” reads one report.

EMC’s really got something to prove here, having reintroduced their all-inclusive solutions earlier this year.  There’s a growing number of objectives data centers must meet, and more importantly they’ve got to be smart about it.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU