Juniper steps up Cisco assault

Juniper has delivered an appetizer with Dell on the way to what could be an comprehensive assault on Cisco on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Dell and Juniper announced a partnership to sell the networking company's gear under the PC maker's PowerConnect brand. The companies said their collaboration will allow customers to deploy a common network management platform and operating system.

Meanwhile, Dell and Juniper said they will collaborate on open standards for virtualized data centers (statement). Under the OEM pact, Dell and Juniper will tag team on MX Series Routers, EX Series Ethernet Switches, SRX Series Services Gateways and Junos Software.

Where's this headed?

Juniper for weeks has been touting its analyst meeting on Thursday at the New York Stock Exchange. While details aren't available, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson and CTO Pradeep Sindhu are expected to outline the company's vision and strategic initiatives.

On Juniper's third quarter earnings conference call last week, Johnson outlined some of the vision:

We continue to generate momentum in the enterprise. Sequentially our enterprise revenue was up 10% quarter on quarter. As positive as that result is, we view our performance in the enterprise as just the starting point for the momentum we believe we can create going forward. A level of dialogue that we are having with our customers are on Junipers value proposition as accelerated significantly over the past two quarters.

Customers are embracing our offering of integrated routing, switching and security on a common platform, our JUNOS Operating System. If they look forward our vision of the data center architecture of the future and the solutions we have today are resonating with our customers.

We believe this positions us very well. We are executing better in the marketplace as we combine our connected sales and marketing strategy with strong partnerships.