Announcement: Juniper Networks starts partenership with Aruba Networks

[Jeroen]

Juniper recently announced their partnership with Aruba Networks.

With this partnesship their intention is to work closely together to deliver open, converged wired and wireless network solutions based on best-of-breed technologies. The partnership includes both joint development efforts and go-to-market collaboration, with the goal of providing innovative solutions for enterprise customers.

In short this means that Juniper will cease developing 802.11ac equipment of which they already had there first products ready in the beta status. Actually I was offered by Juniper to run a 801.11ac beta with them and was expecting the hardware to be delivered this week.
Support of their current 802.11n products will remain for at least the next few years. Juniper will recommend anyone who is interested in 802.11ac gear to look at their strategic parter Aruba Networks.

I only have new Juniper gear up and running for less than 2 years now and finally got rid of several bugs that were very annoying. It's too bad to read this announcement and has me really surprised. Seems that Juniper did a good acquisition that time buy buying Trapeze Networks, but apparently it wasn't worth it in the end.
Hopefully Juniper will keep updating their current WLAN portfolio with new features and bug fixes, instead of fading away from their customers. I also hope the migration path will run smoothly for all their customers and not leave them in a migration nightmare.

The official announcement can be found here:

http://newsroom.juniper.net/press-releases/juniper-networks-and-aruba-networks-partner-to-del-nyse-jnpr-1121002

As a current Juniper WLAN customer, to what WLAN will you be migratinig within the next couple of years?

[LondonDragon]

This came as a surprise to us also, having invested on 4 WLC2800 controllers and loads of WLA532 APs late last year and early this year! Too early to move to AC at the moment, but when the time comes as an Avaya estate the new 9100 series looks promising.

[Jeroen]

Same here, bought 4 WLC2800's and lots of 532's some while ago. Not the right moment yet to move to AC as these untis are pretty much still brand new.
This week I will have my new Juniper sales manager visit the office. I hope he will bring good news instead of leaving these products as they are without any continued development.
Being at the ATF in Barcelona this year, I was very impressed by the new Avaya WLAN9100 (nothing like the old 8100 series). Although it is a bit early to replace the current N models, it seems like a very good alternative for future use. Will be doing a test case soon with this new platform.

[TankII]

Well, economies of scale make sense here.  If it's just the AC products that are affected, since both use the same communication protocols, each can brand the units as their own but connect to either controller.  The R&D development cost is spread between the two companies.
We are completing our Local Switching conversion everywhere this month, and have rolled out N on 532's to take advantage of the newfound performance.  We have only six 422's left to replace, and then we will be completely local-switched and N everywhere.
The announcement does not appear to state they are dropping the Wireless line, only that they found the R&D and Manufacture costs for 802.11AC were high enough to garner partnering with someone who has released product that is standards-compliant on the Infrastructure side.

TankII

[Jeroen]

Good to hear that you have managed to get local switching working, it sure kills latency

I agree from a economic perspective this might be a good move for both companies, especially for Juniper I assume as their WLAN portfolio apparently did not meet the sales requierements. Especially in Europe the sales were far below Junipers expectations.
I had been selected as a beta customer to test their new AC products. The same week that the equipment should be delivered I was informed about this news bulletin, and the beta was cancelled.

My Juniper representative assured me that the N series will not be dropped by Juniper, however I'm not sure about the development continuation of this product line.

They won't sell own Juniper AC gear, but instead will recommend potential customers to go with Aruba gear and their integration with Juniper gear. Current Juniper WLAN won't be integrated with Aruba gear, nor won't Aruba WLAN gear be integrated with Juniper WLAN. Juniper will work to have the Aruba mobility solutions integrated into Juniper routers and switches (not WLAN controllers!). You eventually might be able to run reports about your Juniper gear from an Aruba management system but there will be no option to control and manage a Juniper and Aruba WLAN using the same management system.

Some functionalities will be integrated between the platform but there won't be a 100% integration. Going forward with AC requieres to go with the Juniper/Aruba partnership or take a look at on of its competitors.

[Jeroen]

Yesterday I had a quick talk with my new Juniper representative.
In short, Juniper will continue delivering support and having their current WLAN portfolio available for the next couple of years. However, they will discontinue making new WLAN products nor will they invest in R&D.
It is very unlikely that new features will become available for the current Juniper WLAN.

Future WLAN products can be purchased through Juniper but will be Aruba hardware (Juniper OEM). Their will be no integration of the 2, except that the current Juniper WLAN gear can be 'managed' in the future with an Aruba management tool. It seems that this will be limited to reporting and monitoring only, so any provisioning still needs to be done from Ringmaster for your Juniper WLAN.