Juniper has announced a new go-to market strategy for the enterprise LAN called Simply Connected. The strategy has two connotations, according to Juniper: Users simply want to connect to the network easily and quickly, and IT wants easy-to-manage networking extending from the user to the core.
Go-to-market strategies like Juniper's are not new, and they provide a way for vendors to frame their product sets into "solutions" rather than SKUs. They also provide insight into the focus of the vendor. Cisco’s Borderless Networks, for example, focuses on providing users a seamless networking experience, regardless of where they are.
Juniper is big on vision and for the past several years has been building both its messaging and product integration to support the promises it makes. With the go-to-market strategy, Juniper is also announcing three new campus switches, a WLAN controller and updates to Junos Pulse, the company's mobile client.
Juniper wasn’t the first to talk about a unified OS across its switch lines, but it is the loudest. I think Extreme Networks was most likely first when it announced XOS across its EX switch line. Coupled with their data center strategy, Project Stratus, Juniper is covering both the data center and campus LAN.
While Juniper doesn’t have the same product breadth as Cisco or HP, it also doesn't have the baggage that a long product history carries. The new product announcements fill out Juniper's campus LAN switch line and extend from small to large installations.
The new 14U EX6200 can support up to 432 10/100/1000 copper ports and 384 10/100/1000 ports with dual SRE management modules, and can supply PoE+, 30 watts per port, across all ports with four 5,000-watt power supplies. Juniper is also announcing the EX-3300 family of six fixed-form-factor switches ranging from 24- to 48-port 10/100/1000 models and two that support PoE and PoE+.
