IBM bolsters Juniper pact; Reseller deal with Cisco
IBM took its relationship with Juniper up a notch by announcing and original equipment manufacturer deal. Big Blue also announced deals with Brocade and Cisco.
Under the Juniper deal, the latest in a string of IBM-Juniper collaborations, IBM will rebrand and sell Juniper EX and MX switches and routers later this year.
The OEM pact with Juniper expands on a reseller agreement with IBM Global Technology Services as well as cloud lab collaboration.
Even as IBM gets tighter with Juniper, Big Blue made sure it "expanded its long-standing relationship with Cisco" with a reseller deal. IBM and its channel partners will resell Cisco Nexus 5000 series switches in September.
Cisco has entered the server market and threatened IBM and HP's data center turf.
In addition, IBM introduced the IBM Converged Switch B32 and 10Gb Converged Network Adapter (CNA) for IBM System x. That's a long winded way to say IBM has launched its first Fibre Channel over Ethernet products. These products are manufactured by Brocade in another partnership.
The data center is just full of coopetition these days and IBM appears to be playing the neutral networking party card.