Juniper

Over the past few weeks, I’d been hearing a lot of rumors that Juniper was planning to exit the CDN business. As you may recall, Juniper entered the content delivery game in early 2010 when it acquired Ankeena and the technology became Juniper’s Media Flow portfolio. In a call with the company last week, Juniper said they are not exiting the business, but are changing their focus and are dropping BitGravity’s CDN technology that they licensed earlier in the year.

While Juniper gets lumped into those who offer CDN services, like other vendors, Juniper develops and delivers gear that customers use to deliver content more efficiently. In the case of Juniper, its Media Flow delivery products could be used within a CDN, within a managed video delivery network, or it could be used for transparent caching, depending on which customer we’re talking about.

Juniper made it clear to me that its Media Flow products aren’t going anywhere. It will still deliver the fundamental caching and content delivery products that are the core of its Media Flow portfolio, for customers to use as transparent caches, for multi-screen delivery or even CDNs and will continue to work with its ecosystem partners who are solution providers and offer solutions in this space. But the company will be making some changes with regards to where they focus their efforts on CDN products going forward.

The company said they came to the decision that building a complete CDN solution didn’t make a lot of sense for a company like Juniper, so instead they are focusing their efforts on their strengths: the core Media Flow content delivery and caching engine. This will be the focus for the company and they will continue to invest, develop, enhance and sell the solution. The service management technology acquired from BitGravity, and some other CDN-related technology projects that were underway will no longer be a focus for the company.

What this means for customers is that they can continue to buy Juniper’s Media Flow products just as they were doing today. But if you were holding out for Juniper’s end-to-end CDN solution with service management, you are out of luck—but for everyone else its business as usual.

To me, I don’t see this change in strategy as a negative for Juniper. Very few vendors truly have an end-to-end solution, for any service, and having a focused product strategy is a big key to being successful. Juniper’s approach is to focus on edge services and caching, which are very important pieces needed for what’s taking place with regards to content delivery in the last-mile.