Juniper To Buy Aurrion, Acquiring Technology That Will Boost The Efficiency Of Its Networking Products

Juniper Networks has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Aurrion, a developer of silicon photonics technology, which Juniper plans to incorporate into its products, reducing the costs of its networking systems.

’This is not going to increase Juniper’s capabilities and technology so much, but it’s going to reduce their back-end cost so that they’re either able to be more profitable or deliver technology less expensively,’ said Dominic Grillo, executive vice president of Atrion Communications, a Branchburg, N.J.-based solution provider and longtime Juniper partner. ’It makes a lot of sense.’

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Goleta, Calif.-based Aurrion, founded in 2008, develops a silicon photonic platform that can scale with a business' needs. Its technology can carry information over long distances at a significantly lower cost, said Pradeep Sindhu, founder and chief technology officer of Juniper Networks, in a blog post Tuesday.

Sindhu said Aurrion delivers dramatically lower bit-per-second costs for networking systems, higher capacities for networking interfaces, and greater flexibility in how bandwidth carried on light is processed inside the electronic portions of networking systems.

’This acquisition will strengthen Juniper’s ability to bring the most advanced and most cost-effective network products to market more quickly,’ said Sindhu.

Juniper plans to integrate Aurrion’s technology to make significant improvements to the ’foundation of all of our networking products’ within a relatively short time period, according to Sindhu.

Grillo said it’s going to help Juniper compete more effectively on price, allowing the vendor to deliver more cost-efficient cloud infrastructure products.

’You look at Arista [Networks], they've got real high throughputs and [are] doing it at a reasonable cost. Not that Cisco isn’t always omnipresent too,’ said Grillo. ’If [Juniper] can bring their cost down and allow themselves to do Infrastructure-as-a-Service more often, that’s a good thing for us.’

Grillo said the acquisition enables Juniper to go after more deals they weren’t able to do before from a price standpoint. ’If nothing else, it’s lowering their cost on the back end, even if they don’t have to lower their own prices to customers -- then it’s just going to increase profitability,’ he said.

Aurrion marks Juniper’s second acquisition this year. In January, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based network systems provider announced its acquisition of BTI Systems, which specialized in software-defined networking (SDN).

Juniper's Aurrion is a response to the high market demand for bandwidth as more devices become connected to corporate networks, triggering significant increases in data traffic. Sindhu said customers are demanding greater bandwidth at a lower cost, which is what Juniper is striving for with Aurrion.

’We expect that Aurrion’s breakthrough technology will result in fundamental and permanent improvements in cost per bit-per-second, power per bit-per-second, bandwidth density, and flexibility of networking systems,’ said Sindhu.