Juniper Networks, IBM expand relationship with OEM agreement to advance economics of networking

The addition of Juniper's products to IBM's data center networking portfolio provides customers with a best-in-class networking solution and accelerates both companies' shared vision of advancing the economics of networking and the data center by reducing costs, improving services and managing risk.

"With Juniper's Ethernet technologies added to our data center portfolio, IBM is able to offer customers more choice and flexibility in their networking solutions to address the growing demands being placed on their IT environments," said Jim Comfort, IBM VP of Enterprise Initiatives.

"This new OEM agreement with Juniper will help support IBM's data center networking initiatives through unparalleled network scalability, carrier-class reliability and operational simplicity, accelerating the deployment of our customers' virtualized applications and services, and extending the value of their networks," added Comfort.

Today's data centers require higher performance and less complex networks as an essential element of their evolution. While there are extreme cost pressures on IT budgets, the demand on data centers only increases with exploding data volumes, demand for new services, speed and security, and always-on reliability. In addition, cloud computing will further drive the need for massive scale, efficiency and elasticity from networks and data center architectures. The broadened IBM and Juniper relationship is further evidence of the growing importance of the high-performance network in the progression of data centers toward cloud computing or cloud-like infrastructures. Both companies agree that a high-performance network is vital to the backbone for both the data center (enabling service production) and the global network (enabling service delivery).

Hitesh Sheth, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Ethernet Platforms Business Group, Juniper Networks, said:

"This OEM agreement represents a continued deepening of our relationship with IBM, and a significant new route to market for Juniper. Our focus on delivering fast, reliable, secure, simplified networks fits perfectly into IBM's dynamic infrastructure initiative to help customers accelerate growth and innovation, while creating operational efficiencies and overall savings."

"Today's enterprise must balance IT budgets and growing network complexity with increasing end-user demands and market competition," said Mark Fabbi, Vice President - distinguished analyst, Gartner. "Increasing enterprise options for integrated data center solutions will allow enterprises to more easily achieve more efficient and agile data center networking architectures. The industry will clearly benefit from the innovative, open solutions coming from a range of viable sources."

The OEM agreement allows IBM System & Technology Group (STG) to brand, label and sell select Juniper EX Series Ethernet switches and MX Series Ethernet Services routers.

Helping Customers Reduce Costs, Become More Green:

Juniper's EX and MX Series products are designed to advance IT initiatives for data center consolidation, server virtualization and sustainable information technology. The combined product offering can significantly reduce network complexity and total cost of ownership by up to 61% in capital expenditures, up to 46% in power, up to 46 percent in cooling and up to 33% in rack space in the data center. With the EX and MX Series, customers can achieve greater operational simplicity, agility and efficiency for accelerating the deployment of new applications and services.

Broadened Relationship:

In 2007, IBM and Juniper signed a pan-IBM agreement with IBM's Global Technology Services (GTS) group that allows GTS to resell Juniper's product portfolio as part of their Service Product Line (SPL) solutions, including routing, switching and security technologies. This reseller agreement will continue. IBM also offers their Managed Maintenance Services (MMS) on the Juniper product portfolio. The companies have since looked for opportunities to expand its relationship including today's OEM announcement with IBM's STG. IBM and Juniper have also been working together on joint technology solutions, standards development, network management and managed security services.

For the past year, IBM and Juniper have been working together on the Stratus Project, Juniper's initiative to create a single data center fabric that will deliver a quantum jump in scale, performance and simplicity, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualized data center environments.

The two companies have jointly collaborated on a global technology demonstration highlighting how enterprises can seamlessly extend their private data center clouds. Through this collaboration, IBM and Juniper continue to install advanced networking capabilities into IBM's ten worldwide Cloud Labs for customer engagements. Once installed, IBM and Juniper will be able to seamlessly move client computing workloads between private and publicly managed cloud environments enabling customers to reliably deliver on service level agreements.

Continued research and innovation in cloud computing security has been another focus for IBM and Juniper. The companies are jointly researching cloud computing security models to highlight how customers can mitigate attacks on corporate data and computer systems.