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.