Choice Is A Mirage

Well, sort of. Customers still want choice, and networking vendors claim to offer it. But this isn’t my first rodeo. When I see “choice” claims from vendors, I see it as just marketing’s way of saying that it’s a messy product portfolio. I’m not innocent. When I worked at Cisco and HP ProCurve, I mentioned “choice” during briefings and presentations countless times. At one point or another, every single traditional networking vendor used the tagline to make up the excuse for having multiple product lines. In reality, it’s just the aftermath of internal developments or acquisitions. To react quickly to market changes, vendor execs find it quicker and easier to do one of the following: 1) develop a new product with almost zero backward compatibility with previous hardware or solutions, instead of evolving an existing one that supports a seamless transition, such as Huawei’s first- and second-generation Wi-Fi or 2) buy another company, such as Juniper Networks’ acquisition of Mist Systems.

There is nothing wrong with companies starting new product lines or acquiring companies to expand their portfolio. These tactics should give customers choices on different architectures or approaches to solving a problem based on their needs or abilities. But customers don’t actually get a real choice, because it’s too costly for vendors to manage two or more product lines that produce the same results. Most of the time, the vendors are offering: 1) a new product line with new capabilities that will be supported for a long time with new enhancements and 2) a legacy solution with a short shelf life. As an example, in the past networking vendors retired their controllerless product lines in favor of controller-based ones. To actually deliver on choice, customers expect to be able to choose solutions with all things being equal, such as support, longevity, future feature enhancement, etc., between the product lines.

Why Bring This Up?

Early this year, I commented on the HPE and Juniper acquisition. I said that Juniper was bringing HPE many components (such as a data-center-quality switch and operating system, cloud-based management system, sophisticated networking AI, and telecom product line). But there was a lot of overlap between the two companies, and ultimately, executives should eliminate a lot of product lines, mostly on the Aruba side. It seems that I’m not the only one with this opinion. I’ve spoken with technology teams at retailers, hoteliers, and manufacturers that have or are in the process of considering these vendors; they’ve reinforced their concerns about the longevity of the product lines from HPE and Juniper. And most recently, Cisco’s CFO reiterated this in a SDxCentral article by saying that the market was showing some uncertainty with those vendors. And although we are quick to dismiss competitive conjecture, this claim seems to have some merit. Since the announcement, Arista Networks has seen their networking revenue grow quarter-over-quarter for the last two quarters; Cisco and Huawei grew their network product revenue this last quarter while Juniper and HPE Aruba have declined for the past two straight quarters.

While HPE and Juniper can’t get into the specifics around the future of product lines due to regulatory constraints, is HPE acknowledging the problem of overlap? No. HPE executives are doubling down on the importance of customer choice rather than acknowledging there is any overlap or the overlap as problematic. Like it or not, tough decisions will need to be made and the Band-Aid must be ripped off. This is a critical time for many networking organizations, and bad investments can cripple digital initiatives. These orgs are amid three major transitions: virtual network infrastructure (VNI), business-optimized networks (BONs), and blending security and networking together into Zero Trust edge (ZTE). To land these transformations, organizations must empower business units and non-IT employees to manage networks via a businesswide networking fabric.

The emergence of businesswide networking fabrics to support digital businesses requires cloud-based management solutions, augmented by AI, for local area networks (LAN), wireless, wide area networks (WAN), and cloud networks. Networking teams don’t have the resources, skills, or time to try to make different products from the same vendor, such as HPE Aruba Central, Juniper Apstra, and Juniper Mist, work together with half a dozen operating systems. Case in point? ZTE. Customers are tired of integrating security and network solutions. They are opting for solutions that blend these capabilities together. This is why HPE and Juniper competitors’ networking has made major changes in their strategies:

  • Cisco has started to pivot and is combining once-disparate product lines under Meraki and its data center cloud management system.
  • Extreme Networks has been quietly doing the same thing over the last five years by integrating Avaya, Enterasys, Extreme, Brocade, and Foundry, to name a few, into Extreme’s single-cloud-based management for wired and wireless.

Many business and technology leaders are realizing that the network is critical to the success of business digitalization and need strategic partners to ensure a BON. Strategic vendors should not only provide more products and assistance during a business boom but also help eliminate waste and unused infrastructure during times of operational changes, such as infrastructure alterations. A partnership includes mutual vulnerability and risk-sharing. HPE and Juniper must do better than providing choice, or they will be left behind. The new executive team after the merger needs to be up-front about the future of product lines since the current executives can’t do it until the deal closes because of regulatory rules. Customers know that certain ones will go away, so to be a good strategic, not transactional, partner, HPE should work with customers to create a transition plan that fairly balances the cost to customers for the disruption and evolution that the HPE-Juniper merger is creating.

I daresay networking hasn’t been this exciting in years.

Keep an eye out for the report, “The State Of IT Networks, 2024.” It should be on the website in a few weeks. And as always, please share your thoughts with me. If you are a Forrester client and want to discuss, please schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me by reaching out to inquiry@forrester.com.