Juniper Networks Completes BTI Acquisition, Poised to Offer SDN

Juniper Networks has announced that it completed the acquisition of cloud and metro infrastructure maker BTI Systems.

“The acquisition marks an exciting time for our companies, our customers and our partners,” Juniper development and innovation executive vice president and general manager Jonathan Davidson said in a company blog post. “By combining two industry innovators, Juniper believes it can now offer a comprehensive, robust solution under a unified management architecture to address the fast growing data center interconnect and metro packet optical transport markets.”

Juniper announced that it intended to acquire BTI back in January. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move will allow Juniper to compete better in cloud data center and Software Defined Networking (SDN) markets.

While many businesses are moving to the cloud to simplify their operations, the remaining cloud operators are finding their back end needs are getting much more complex, so they’re turning to SDN to manage that complexity.

The Ottawa, Canada-based BTI specializes in hardware and software that allows data centers in a close geographical area to communicate.

Juniper and BTI plan to integrate their optical switching platforms to appeal to markets like content delivery, hosting providers and ISPs who need to tie together disparate data centers.

The company didn’t mention it, but it’s also really taking on its main competitor: Cisco. For a long time, Cisco has been to enterprise networking what Microsoft has been to enterprise software: the safe choice for most companies. Cisco has also embraced the cloud and SDN in its new offerings and acquisitions.

The reason these companies love the cloud so much is that cloud providers often need to upgrade their networking hardware to keep up with demand, which Cisco, Juniper and others are more than happy to supply. In Juniper’s case, it’s just following the demands of its customers as their needs change. The BTI acquisition will give them an easy in to join the SDN bandwagon.