Partners: Meru A Good Fit For Juniper
"My worry has been that Cisco might buy Meru up and bury them, but I think Juniper would be a good fit," said Monte Seifers, technology director at Converged Solutions Group, a Nashville, Tenn.-based Meru partner.
The deal would make sense because Juniper doesn't have a strategic wireless component to compete with Cisco's end-to-end infrastructure offering, Seifers said.
Juniper refused to comment on industrywide speculation that it is close to buying Sunnvyvale, Calif.-based Meru. The speculation heated up Monday following a report on unstrung.com.
Meru would neither confirm nor deny that an acquisition is in the works.
Tom Duffy, president of IGXglobal, a Juniper partner in Rocky Hill, Conn., said acquiring Meru would fit into Juniper's strategy of bolstering its unified access control architecture.
"Juniper wants to gain control over all of the users and endpoints in a network, and having Meru would allow them to have complete coverage including wireless access, and the ability to identify a user at any time and provide a secure path to data," Duffy said.
Meru's technology makes it possible to extend a single channel across a large enterprise area, which has enabled the company to provide a Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) infrastructure for enterprises that includes strong QoS, said Joel Conover, an analyst at Current Analysis. Given Juniper's coziness with VoIP provider Avaya, Meru's technology is "highly complimentary" to the overall architecture, he said.
Juniper could use the technology as part of a router play, a branch office security play, or simply as a way to compete and win the hearts of enterprise customers, Conover said. "Security and wireless definitely go hand in hand, so from that angle, there would be some good synergies."
As a result of its VoWLAN capabilities, Meru is well-positioned to benefit from the coming explosion of dual mode phones capable of roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, Seifers said. Meru last year began working with Japan's Osaka Gas to deploy a wide-area WLAN for voice as part of a project that will allow workers to use dual mode Wi-Fi cellular handsets from NTT DoCoMo, Seifers said.
Meru also recently unveiled plans to roll out software in Q2 that uses a variety of packet inspection, channel scanning and signal jamming techniques to protect wireless networks against intruders without adding traffic to the WLAN.