It has been more than a year since Juniper acquired Mist. Juniper exec described this as Marriage made in heaven. Now, I want to know where are the children. What is Mist's contribution to Juniper's top line and bottle line? Juniper is $5B revenue in 2017 and it is going to end up 2020 with $4.2B, which too with highly buzzed with Mist and Contrail product portfolio. Where all are these acquisitions turning the story for Juniper?
5 replies (most recent on top)
@arac+17mSfp1N you a old timer at Juniper #respect
@arac+17mSfp1N,
Excellent. Detailed analysis jnpr failures.
Layer Five - acquired IP never used (some good people though)
Pacific Advantage Ltd - trash
Micro Magic Inc.- great company, destroyed by juniper - also the first time FRIEND OF PRADEEP and later CEO (fired!) Shaygan Kheradpir made an appearance in the Juniper saga
Pacific Broadband - a complete and total failure of diligence
Nexsi Systems - asset buy after they cratered and ran full-speed into the wall and ran out of money; some fantastic engineers and some absolutely terrible management, packaged up and assets bought. got a MIPS multicore ASIC but also, in another total failure of diligence, didn't get the rights to make more of them (!)
Unisphere Networks - a great acquisition and a solid company in the space, the relationship between Juniper and the Unispehere team rotted from pretty much day one when Pradeep went to tall the Unisphere team that it was time for the pros to take over and show them how NOSes are written; at the time he did this Unicos supported 100k+ interfaces and Junos could barely do a few thousand...
NetScreen Technologies - great acquisition though probably never achieved positive ROI for the price
Kagoor Networks - trash
Peribit Networks - trash
Redline Networks - trash
Acorn Packet Solutions - trash
Funk Software - bought a RADIUS company, made the people crazy, spun it out again before it all fell apart
Ankeena Networks - temporarily got a VPN that was pretty great, people all left
Trapeze Networks - a failing wifi company that invested way too much in optimized placement, the good people had left before the acquisition, Juniper was the bagholder for a dead product and company which they further k–led by trying to Junosify it
SMobile Systems - trash
Altor Networks - trash
Brilliant Telecommunications - good ocmpany juniper didn't know what to do with
Mykonos Software - ??
Contrail Systems - Juniper's second attempt at a spin-in (xsigo got tanked by the stock options backdating scandal), some code written in a few weeks on a guy's laptop to do something that didn't need to be done that juniper wasn't successful at describing; mostly a way to funnel cash to the founders and some people who left juniper to loop back for $$$
A bunch of other stuff (low grade optical trash, etc.) bought after that.
the best juniper acquisition is a tossup between Micro Magic and Pacific Broadband:
on the Micro Magic side, they bought a company that basically did specialized full-custom ASIC designs with their own layout tools and then hounded the people in the company for not doing things the juniper way until they collectively said "f— this sh–" and left
on the pacific broadband front, after swearing no more bad acquisitions and how there would be blowback on the sponsoring executive (the CFO at the time) who was signing off on it if it didn't go well, they buy the thing without realizing they didn't even own the IP to the DOCSIS chip they thought they were getting and then spent 2Y trying to design various flavors of a franken-M20 which bolted or welded or front-panel connected an M20 to a PBC chassis, and then finally sh–canned the whole thing.
Juniper is to acquisitions what cancer is to christmas.
The Juniper record on acquisition is terrible, so they will have no impact. They don’t have the sales model to make a success of Wireless. Look at the mess they made when abandoning the customers who bought Trapeze