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Cisco Spending Millions of Dollars Secretly Purchasing New Juniper Products
FrankPoole (1736680) writes According to a CRN investigative report, Cisco has been spending millions of dollars over several years to secretly purchase Juniper Networks' products, including new QFabric and MX series routers, for use in its 'competitive analysis lab,' where the products are tested and reverse engineered. According to the report, some of the Juniper products purchased by Cisco were still in beta and not yet commercially released. In addition, CRN discovered that a main source for Cisco to obtain these Juniper products was, ironically, a company called Torrey Point Group, a fast-growing VAR that was awarded Juniper's Part of the Year in 2011.
Dogs lick their balls. What's new?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Perhaps they resell the products.
1. Get Juniper routers
2. Put custom firmware with NSA backdoor
3. ?
4. Profit
As soon as you start putting something on the market, especially if you are not selling directly to the end customer (i.e., through a distributor or VAR), you have to assume that your competitors are going to get ahold of your products. Expect them to be reverse engineered. Trade Secrets do not exist once it's out in the wild.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if Cisco didn't have this stuff. I would also be surprised if Juniper didn't have Cisco products.
Does anyone really think Juniper doesnt't purchase Cisco gear in a similar fashion? Corporate behavior like this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
Amazing how current patent law is so useless it can't stop blatant reverse engineering, yet it can stifle so much real innovation.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I thougt reverse engineering this way was against the law in America?
This happens all the time amongst competitors. It doesn't mean they want to reverse engineer or violate patents; it is usually so you can educate yourself as to what your competitors are up to and make sure that you're staying competitive.
This is not at all surprising (or illegal). Almost any industry manufacturing any kind of wiget, be it a router, a car, or an orbital booster will purchase and examine their competition.
This would be a story only if they acquired these illegally, for example by breaking and entering the competitor's research lab.
Nope.
I actually read it as "Crisco Spending Millions of Dollars Secretly Purchasing New Juniper Products" and was confused as to why a food oil brand was expanding into products using the coniferous plant Juniper.
Company in any area would be pretty silly if they don't buy and check how competitors' equipment works. Car analogy actually works here there - people selling Abcd cars would drive Bghj and Celkj cars, so they can better compare them and advise customers of faults in others.
Even TFA says:
purchasing a competitor's products for testing and reverse engineering is not only a common and accepted practice, but "an important component of entrepreneurial capitalism" in the IT industry. "This is part of what makes markets work," he said. "You're supposed to know how your competitor's products work and incorporate as much as you can to make the next generation of your product better."
Regarding intelectual property Cisco seems far more advanced on hardware level, so obtaining gear from competitor is not really going to move things forward. Article also does not mention (unless I missed it) obtaining equipment which is in developement.
The best way for commercial spying is information exchanged by people - engineers from all those networking Silicon Valley companies know each other, they gossip, they betray secrets. This is how most of information leaks through, straight from the sources, not via reverse-engineering.
You can be also completely sure that Juniper bought Cisco equipment for the same purposes, and so did other companies. Even TFA mentions Alcatel-Lucent buying Cisco. It was an all-out activity.
Gin infused pies, of course.
Car analogy actually works here there - people selling Abcd cars would drive Bghj and Celkj cars
That Celkj sounds like some new East European vehicle brand.
It might just have something to do with the fact that the Juniper products are with few exceptions a million times better. I avoid almost all of the CIsco gear like the plague.
as an IT in the business for three decades now, Juniper does make better gear. Yes, this is subjective, but their HW and SW are just nicer all around.
I saw it as "Jupiter" products and thought it was a rant on Buy (earth) American products first.
Regarding intelectual property Cisco seems far more advanced on hardware level, so obtaining gear from competitor is not really going to move things forward. Article also does not mention (unless I missed it) obtaining equipment which is in developement.
The best way for commercial spying is information exchanged by people - engineers from all those networking Silicon Valley companies know each other, they gossip, they betray secrets. This is how most of information leaks through, straight from the sources, not via reverse-engineering.
You can be also completely sure that Juniper bought Cisco equipment for the same purposes, and so did other companies. Even TFA mentions Alcatel-Lucent buying Cisco. It was an all-out activity.
Actually, Cisco used to be a front runner with more advanced network products. However, more and more network vendors, such as Juniper and Aruba, have caught up and passed Cisco. For example, while Juniper routers aren't as well known in the enterprise space, they are used heavily in the ISP and cloud provider space.
The one area where Cisco still has an edge is the ability to centralize management of all of their devices. Practically every network management solution provider supports Cisco. This will change as Juniper becomes more popular in the Enterprise, but it just isn't there yet.
The article did mention Cisco buying Beta gear. This is usually the last stage before release. It must have been a Beta unit to show customers for the VAR to be able to get their hands on it.
The only thing notable about this is that the partner did it against the wishes of Juniper.
I work for a very large storage vendor, and we buy the other very large vendor's equipment. And they buy ours. Both circumstances are bought (legally) through partners.
Various web hosting providers including GoDaddy have been known to buy hosting accounts at competitors. This is often done with a company credit card under the name of a company executive or division manager. They do it to see things like how much traffic a common application like WordPress or ZenCart can take on various price points for hosting at the competition. They may also check out customizations to the control panel software and choose which features they may want to implement for their customers, too. This is often not even frowned upon by the target company. It's an endorsement that you're of interest to the competition for one thing.
Figuring out how your performance compares to the competition is quite different from being able to improve your own performance without killing your margin. That said, with something as easily monitored as a server account any attempts to poke around under the hood too much are easier to stop than in hardware like Juniper/Cisco.
I should think that a _networking_ company is required to have competing products for interoperability testing and debugging.
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...the SlashDot community will keep this uner wraps.
Huawei was accused of pretty much the same thing by the US companies/gov't. Looks like not a Chinese exclusive, but it is OK that we do this.
This is part of a normal Competitive Intelligence framework.
This happens in virtually all domains where an engineered product is involved. The extent, degree of it being publicized, and degree of funding varies by industry, geopolitical location, and other factors.
News Flash! Company legally buys competitor's gear on the open market!
What, precisely, is the story here?
I have been in Enterasys, Cisco, Extreme, Juniper labs (in their respective organizations). All of them have everyone elses equipment. They check from interoperability and also how the other bands perform. This is big especially in the carrier routing space.
story is that one of juniper's major partners was underhandedly selling prerelease, demo, & beta products to cisco. while legal, it's shady as fuck, and is almost certainly something that would have pissed juniper off to the point of severing ties with the vendor.
Thanks, missed the beta reference on first read.
Cisco is still more advanced on hardware front, but they lag a lot on software. Standards implementation (even if created by Cisco) in particular, although given how many products they have to cover partially explains those problems.
Juniper usually did "cheap but good enough" trick to gain a lot of ground. Cisco's products were often better engineered, but customers did not care for those better features, or did not understand them, which resulted in Juniper gaining a lot of market share. They have not passed Cisco though (yet) - in 2014 they have about 17% in edge (19% Cisco) and 28% in core routers (62% Cisco).
Markets are in transition anyway (buzzword compliancy), so next 2-3 years will show who got it right. Regardless of checking out competitors' products.
Sounds Turkish or Albanian to me. ;-)
I guess car companies will run out of fancy names soon, and people will drive Ford Celkj or Fiat Celkj
I'm sure you had plenty of VAX to clean the office each night, too.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Can you elaborate on the repeated claims that Cisco has better hardware?
The argument of custom vs merchant silicon has been going on a while, but I feel as though most people agree that the competitive advantages of custom silicon has dramatically decreased with modern commodity chip fab. I am sure they have some neat asics that perform specific proprietary tasks well, but I don't know if I would say that it makes them better. I am more for open standards.
This problem is as old as manufacturing.
Do we really not know or fail to remember that this is how the entire Japanese electronics and automotive industries were spawned? This is how the electronic industry of Korea came about, and one third of the entire Soviet Union's compute capacity from 1950 to 1990. Not to mention the entire DECSYSTEM-20 compatibles market and all the AMD, Cyrix, IBM, NexGen, WinChip, RISE, etc. x86-compatibles market.
I'm sure someone has already or will soon point out how this is newsworthy.
Kriston
It's OK that American companies do this, because the Chinese do it so you're not as bad as that might make you seem.
In theory, your patent is supposed to mean that reverse-engineering for technology is both unnecessary and nearly worthless. You'd still expect some reverse engineering to find the specs of a product, either for marketing, making a competitive product, or interoperability.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Why is this a story? this is common practise for pretty much all industries, especially IT based ones. Most companies don't even try to hide the fact, nothing wrong with the practise, they would be fools if they were not constantly checking what the competition does.
Does this mean Cisco will stop crying about China stealing all their secrets now?
I've worked for two different hardware manufactures in the past, one of which made boxes that go into data centers, and one that made boxes that go into living rooms. OF COURSE we bought our competitor's products via a "cut out" company, and then took them to the teardown and reverse engineering lab. Everyone does it. Everyone has always done it. Everyone will always do it. It is specifically permitted in intellectual property law, and it's also well understood in case law, such that everyone knows that trying to enforce against it via "user license agreements" will fail in court.
or some other DRM stuff its illegal, but this is okay? Srsly?