Which Tech Giant to Trust? Navigating Choices Between HPE, Juniper, Broadcom, and Beyond
I'm Max Clark. This isn't new news, but I wanna talk about it anyways. HPE is buying Juniper Networks. Still mind blown over this one. I I am still processing it.
Speaker 1:What a weird turn of events. Last thing I would have expected with Juniper was was would have been HPE acquiring them. It makes me think of, like, Oracle buying some microsystems in some ways. And j HPE isn't really known for their, like, stellar switching and routing stack, which makes, of course, perfect sense that they'd be buying Juniper because Juniper, by all arguments, is the best routing platform on the market. Now Juniper MXs, if you haven't had the privilege of pleasure of working with them, are just just so cool.
Speaker 1:I mean, they're great. Cisco, finally, with the ASR 9 k's and iOS XR made a massive catch up and and but they were just behind for, like, a decade. And anyways, lots of speculation of what's driving this. And one of the core things, of course, becomes HPE needing to round out and shore up their story around their routing SD WAN security switching an access point world, and Juniper has missed, which is this cool AI access point. I'm just gonna say AI.
Speaker 1:Right? Because, I mean, if you call it AI, then it's gotta be great. Right? So they've they've got their access point technology has their access points have AI technology, and enterprises love that. But this poses a really interesting question now.
Speaker 1:Let's say if you're in the market today to go out and purchase, let's say, routers. Let's say you're purchasing a you're building a new office location. Right? So you're gonna have to go out and you have to buy some sort of, NAC A way appliance AKA firewall for most people, switches and access points. Who do you buy?
Speaker 1:Do you buy Aruba? It's the HPE. Do you buy traditional HPE switches? Do you buy the Aruba switches and access points? Do you buy Juniper switches and access points?
Speaker 1:Do you buy Fortinet? Do you buy Meraki? Do you buy Ubiquiti? Like, who do you buy? And the crazy thing about this is until this really gets announced and flushed out and I mean really we're talking about is they have to close acquisitions and get through regulatory and all these other fun things which who knows how long that takes in today's market of m and a being the devil and all these governments preventing it from happening but are you betting that HP and or comes out on top or Aruba comes out on top or Juniper comes out on top and if you're investing into a stack today what stacks still around in 3 4 5 years I don't know.
Speaker 1:And until that starts getting communicated, it's it's hard. Maybe they're smart. Maybe they run these things in parallel for a while before they pull a Broadcom and something gets axed. Speaking of Broadcom, holy moly. Broadcom just there's like the meme of, like, hold my beer, and I'm gonna go off on a tangent for a little bit here.
Speaker 1:So Broadcom buys VMware, which everybody was already nervous as all heck about, and then goes and immediately does what everybody was afraid of doing. And then just like just has this moment of like hold my beer and just okay. So if you don't know Broadcom buys VMware. VMware had some phenomenal technology. So the Velocloud SD WAN platform was VMware and and so VMware also known for their hypervisor technology.
Speaker 1:So so VMware and then which was then enterprise with vSphere and then had service provider implications with the cloud. And then there's other stuff that gets wrapped up into this. There's load balancers. There's configuration management tool. I mean, but the Broadcoms is going like an and just just like the vikings is going through and just just just axing everything as quickly as they possibly can because you gotta pay for the acquisition somehow.
Speaker 1:And from that, they then announce and basically say that if you're not one of our top service providers we're not gonna we're gonna cut you off basically. But they don't say what that is and nobody really knows and and and so now we get to go run around with our clients and talk to service providers and ask them have you received a letter yet from Broadcom saying that you're in or you out? Like like because you have to assume you're out until you're in right and so so now you're start I mean, and what's strange about it is, like, okay, I understand from a distribution standpoint of you don't wanna have a lot of relationships and a lot of deals with a lot of different companies, you can do distribution and you can say, okay, great. Now everything is gonna flow through these 10 resellers or 5 or 2 or 1. But that's not what they did.
Speaker 1:They just said if you're under this tier, I should stop. That's not what they did. They said if you're under this tier, you're just out and that tier isn't defined and nobody knows what the heck is happening. And this is crazy because now even the large v cloud service providers and we're talking big massive infrastructure. So maybe they got the letter and they're still in but now they have to figure out like is this safe and what's their plan b.
Speaker 1:So now you've got a situation where not only do we have to evaluate for our clients. Are you a VMware shop? Are you a VeloCloud shop? Are you a vCloud shop? Are you safe?
Speaker 1:Did you get yes you're still gonna be in business next year from Broadcom or you're just already dead man walking and then in addition to that we have to start also figuring out like what is your plan b step because can you trust Broadcom the answer is you probably can't so now you got to figure out what comes next and it's just it is crazy time so big winners in all this conversation here this this this this little this little rant is my dog is still barking at the whatever happened at the door and walked away. Cisco and Fortinet are just having a great time right now because they can just sit on the sidelines and and just keep their mouth shut and don't have to do anything. And Microsoft, the hyper with, Microsoft is really happy. Cloudvent. I mean, it's just it's anyways.
Speaker 1:I've been trying to avoid this topic for a little while because I didn't wanna get too off the rails, and I'm getting off the rails. I'd love to know what you think is going on with all this stuff. And, I mean, are you if you're in this mess, what are you guys doing about it? How are you insulating and protecting yourself from your new benevolent dictators of broad Broadcom, and and how are you mitigating risk? Because in our case, what we've seen so far is mitigating risk and prudence here is just getting ready for the rip and replace of all of this technology because nothing has been really communicated that makes anything beyond or or or less than that feel safe.
Speaker 1:I'm Max Clark. Comment below. Let me know.
