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-1121002As a current Juniper WLAN customer, to what WLAN will you be migratinig within the next couple of years?