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A day after Kireeti Kompella guest blogged on SDNCentral – which set a record as the most-viewed guest blog on SDNCentral in a 24 hour period — his former employer, Juniper Networks announced plans to acquire his SDN startup, Contrail Systems for $176M in stock and cash.

According to the SEC filing, Contrail will receive $57.5 million in cash plus 5,819,148 share in Juniper stock.

This deal was not a surprise to us — and a smart move by Juniper.  We’ve heard multiple rumors since Contrail was funded that it was designed to be a Juniper spin-in from the beginning and given the vast number of former Juniper people at the company, this is no surprise.

For those who are not familiar with Contrail they are pitching a distributed network operating system with orchestration of common protocols such as BGP and XMPP.  It’s also a good bet that we’ll see MPLS included in this as well.

What does this mean:

1. OpenFlow: expect less, not more OpenFlow support in Juniper products.  Contrail reinforces their strategy of focusing on layer 3 based technologies which if applied correctly — drive less of a need for a programable TCAM that OpenFlow is driving today.
2. Juniper:  Restocks their software team with leading technologies who understand enterprises (just look at the former Cisco, Aruba, Google folks at Contrail and you’ll see what I mean) who can perhaps ‘do-over’ Juniper’s attempt to expand into the enterprise market.  This also gives Juniper a clear SDN strategy to position with customers.
3. Essentially positions Juniper and the Contrail to compete with other SDN architectures — including Cisco, VMware, and OpenFlow.

Checkout more from our Companies:

• Featured Interview: Radware CTO, Avi Chesla, Discusses SDN Strategy in Application Delivery And Security (5/16/2013)
• 5/17: Catch BROCADE’s Demo of OpenFlow in Hybrid Port Mode During SDNCentral’s DemoFriday™ (5/16/2013)
• Missed the Lunch? Catch the Video of Arista Networks SDN Essentials Seminar (5/15/2013)
• Featured Video By 6WIND: Accelerated vSwitch with Eric Carmès and Charlie Ashton (5/14/2013)
• Featured Interview: Deep-Dive into Juniper’s SDN Controller and Strategy with Ankur Singla, Former CEO of Contrail (5/14/2013)

About the Author

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Matthew Palmer

Matt has 20+ years of software-defined networking (SDN), cloud computing, SaaS, & computer networking… More

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