There must be a lot of junior people following the technology market these days — I’m really amazed at some of the stuff I read all the time. Back in the dark ages when I entered the Tech industry, we didn’t have e-mail, IM, blogs, tweets, etc., so you turned to industry rags like venerable Network World or Computerworld to get industry insider analysis. Now anyone with a keyboard and an opinion gets to speak. Good for free speech, bad for knowledge transfer.

Case in point–a friend forwarded me an article suggesting that the IBM/Blade Networks deal was a big blow to Juniper. With Blade Networks in hand, IBM would now package Blade Networks and IBM blade servers together to counter Cisco UCS featuring integrated networking and compute (note: the article failed to mention storage but that’s another point). While this wouldn’t kill Juniper, it would limit Juniper and others to the remaining laggards that want to buy separate networking and server boxes.

Now, full disclosure: Juniper is an ESG customer but so is Blade Networks, IBM, and just about every other tech vendor. That said, this article fails to recognize some very fundamental market realities:

1. Cisco UCS just started shipping last year so Cisco is playing catch up to IBM, not the other way around.
2. Buying Blade changes nothing as IBM was already reselling the network blades.
3. While the concept of integrated compute, network, and storage sounds appealing, ESG Research indicates little market interest. Yes, this is a good approach for service providers but unless we are talking about a green field implementation, service providers still have legacy servers as well as Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches to replace.
4. Blade Networks makes access switches. Yes, Juniper makes top-of-rack access switches that may compete on functionality, but Juniper’s real expertise is virtual switches and chassis-based aggregation and core switches. The most likely scenario is Blade at the Edge and Juniper in the core.

Finally, Blade isn’t really a networking vendor as it really only has one product — network blades. Does this help IBM with turnkey blade servers? Yes. Does this help IBM compete on big network-connected “smart planet” projects? No.

Related posts:

1. IBM Buys Blade Networks — An Obvious Marriage For Server Virtualization and Dynamic Data Centers
2. Cisco Announcement: More than the CRS-3
3. Juniper’s Mobile Device Security Gamble
4. What about Extreme Networks?
5. The Cisco Squeeze

Tags: Blade Networks, Ethernet, IBM, Juniper Networks