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.

Comments

And..

[oldhack]

Dogs lick their balls. What's new?

Re:And..

[sabri]

I figure Juniper will likely rethink their VAR relationship with Cisco's front company, though.

Why? Juniper knows this might to happen. So why not make sure that Cisco pays top price rather than getting it from Ebay?

QFX has been with customers for a long time now so I don't see a problem with that either. If a VAR can resell it to Cisco, it has been with early adopter customers for a while

And what I don't understand is the part about reverse engineering. Yes, that may take place. But there is a very good other reason why every large vendor of routing equipment has competitive products in their engineering lab: interoperability. I have worked for two large vendors and have been in the labs of a few others and I have seen many interoperability labs. In fact, at one point in my career I was assigned to literally drag some equipment across the street to our direct competitor, install it in their lab and help them get some interoperability working (this was obviously to satisfy some issues we had with a large mutual customer). And for those interested, I crossed Holger Way and didn't stay in the parking lot :)

Not to mention the fact that vendors ship a shitload of beta products every six months to the EANTC interoperability tests and other marketing events.

And your point is what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:And your point is what?

[Austerity Empowers]

I've never worked in a place that did not have a competitive analysis lab and that did not have a tear-down process where everyone's products were looked at top to bottom, literally dissected, x-rayed, etc. It's used by everyone from design engineers on future products, to supply chain analysts to lawyers looking for patent infringements.

It's a good practice, too often companies get dominated by a few senior people with strong personalities who refuse to change. Show them a landscape of products were things are done differently, and with evidence that those things are working BETTER, and you can sometimes unclog some old-fartism. It's rare to see products with idea that hadn't been thought of before, but frequently you see implemented ideas that were shot down in your own org by someone.

I don't care how prerelease something is, if you put it out there expect that your competitors will see it.

Re:Twas Ever Thus

[Ken D]

This is not news, it was SOP back in the 90's to get your hands on the competitors' new products and figure out how to sell against them, i.e. figure out their weaknesses.

Re:But didn't their patents protect them? ;D

[Ralph Wiggam]

If it wasn't for legal reverse engineering, most of us would be sitting in front of $2000 IBM PCs.

Re:Twas Ever Thus

[MightyMartian]

I can't believe Juniper just handed over their VARs beta products without some sort of an NDA. That just seems utterly bizarre and inept.