You might think that in this time of service provider spendingrestraint telecom equipment manufacturers won't be adventurous. ButJuniper Networks and Nokia Siemens Networks have decided the paperpartnership they announced in February to deliver carrier Ethernetsolutions wasn't enough. So they've decided, as one Juniper exec put itto me, to put some meat on the bones by creating a jointventure.
The partners decided that “in order togive this the right level of focus we should put together a jointventure that will have employees that will do nothing but focus onensuring we're building and marketing a compelling solution,” said RamiRahim, Juniper's vice-president of product management for edge andaggregation products. Although the JV will knock on the doors ofenterprises, initially the target markets will be mobile and landlineservice providers and carriers looking for Ethernet-basedinfrastructure.
No new products will be created. Rather the JVwill assemble, test and certify bundled solutions around Juniper's MXEthernet services routers, Nokia Siemens' A-Series carrier Ethernetswitches and that company's Apsen network management system.
TheJV hasn't been named yet (my bet is “NSN-Juniper”), and systems won'tbe available until the end of the year. Which may be a good thing assome industry observers believe service provider and carrier spendingwill pick up in 2010. “Certainly the [economic] environment is tough,”said Rahim, “but if you take a look at the carrier Ethernet spending aspredicted by analysts, it is still a growing component of serviceprovider spend.”
