Juniper goes wireless: to buy Trapeze Networks from Belden

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 17 November 2010 16:03

IT Industry - Strategy

Juniper has made a $US152m foray into the WiFi networking business, agreeing to acquire Trapeze Networks, a specialist in enterprise WiFi technology, including mesh networks, from Belden, which claims to be retaining is focus on wireless technology.

Juniper said the acquisition would make WLAN infrastructure a key part of its portfolio, accelerate its growth in the enterprise market and advance its vision for the new network.

According to Juniper "Trapeze Networks provides the highest levels of WLAN reliability, performance, security and management for today's most demanding mobile applications. The company's innovative WLAN technology is highly complementary to Juniper's campus and branch switching, routing and security business.

"Customers will be able to build new networks based on Juniper's end-to-end routing, security, wired and wireless switching infrastructure that improve users' experience and increase their productivity regardless of location, while delivering lowest total cost of ownership."

In a posting on Juniper's Blog, David Yen executive vice president emerging technologies, said: "One of the key challenges facing enterprises today is how to improve their users' experience and increase their productivity, regardless of location or device. At the same time, enterprises are seeking to simplify their networks and reduce TCO while ensuring end-to-end security.

"Our goal is to enable our customers to provide seamless, high-quality secure connectivity to key network services, regardless of where, when or how they access their networks. By making WLAN infrastructure a key part of our portfolio, we plan to accelerate Juniper's growth in the enterprise market and deliver on a complete vision for the new network."

By acquiring Trapeze Juniper has filled a major gap in its networking portfolio and gained technology in an area where rival Cisco is particularly strong. However one of Juniper's main claims of competitive advantage is that its Junos operating system is common across every item of networking gear it sells.

Over the years it has successfully ported Junos onto a range of acquired networking products, most notably the NetScreen network security products. It will almost certainly intend to do the same with Trapeze equipment in the long term.

Trapeze Networks claims to hold 17 patents, more than any other WLAN provider, with 49 more patent filings pending. Trapeze has developed a WLAN architecture called Smart Mobile that is claimed to combine the advantages of both centralised and distributed approaches to networking or 'intelligent switching'.

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