North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

RE: Anyone heard anything Good or Bad about Juniper equipment ?

  • From: Brett L. Hawn
  • Date: Sat Oct 14 08:44:55 2000

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Donelan [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 7:00 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Anyone heard anything Good or Bad about Juniper equipment ?


On Fri, 13 October 2000, "Brett L. Hawn" wrote:
> I like Juniper as much as the next person, this doesn't however, make me
> naieve enough to believe that they're going to be able to leap the
customer
> support and technical support hurdles that all the other large companies
> have hit.

They probably won't.  But by that time, everyone hopes there will be a
new up-and-coming competitor.  The founders will probably be ex-employees
who got feed up with the bigness, and started the next company.

IBM -> Digital -> Compaq -> Dell -> ????

There are already several companies nipping at Juniper's heels.  This is
a good thing.

When companies start focusing on strategic architectures, alliances, and
certifying; they stop innovating.


While I agree with the sentiment, can you afford to constantly be swapping
out one vendor's equipment for another vendors every 3-5 years? I'll grant
that there is a significant amount of 'upgrade' style swapping done already.
One however, assumes that folks are getting a reasonable price cut on the
new items by turning in the old ones. This isn't nearly as likely to happen
when switching to a new vendor for a multitude of reasons including but not
limited to:

Its a startup, lets face it, they're not going to have the assets to back
themselves with if they give monster discounts on hardware from the get go.
They can't afford to price themselves out of business.

While some of the older companies can afford 'buy back' programs, Vendor Y
isn't likely to take Vendor X's hardware as downpaymnet on their stuff.

Call me jaded and cynical, I'm pretty well convinced these days that
upgrading to the latest and greatest isn't all that great. There's something
to be said for stability and working relationships with vendors.