Juniper mulls sale of mobile security unit
Vendor facing investor pressure to reduce costs
Once heralded as the cornerstone of the company's BYOD support strategy and a key part of its Simply Connected portfolio, Juniper Networks is reportedly considering the sale of its Junos Pulse mobile security unit as part of a continuing effort to satisfy investor demands for lower costs and improved financial performance.
Quoting sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reported the world's second-largest networking equipment manufacturer had hired investment bank UBS AG to help broker a deal for Junos Pulse as Juniper looks to keep pace with market-leading rival Cisco.
The news comes just two weeks after Juniper said it would slash six per cent of its global workforce of about 9,500, - with most of the cuts coming from middle management, officials said. Juniper has made a number of structural and strategic moves over the past year as part of an effort to appease Elliot Management - an activist investor - that has been pressuring the vendor shed non-core assets and refocus on beating Cisco, HP and Huawei in networking and security.
In regulatory filings that detailed the layoffs, Juniper officials said they felt the company "is taking a balanced approach to cost management and prioritising and strengthening our focus on the innovation that matters most to our customers."
Founded in 1996, Juniper has a market capitalisation of $11.5bn (£6.85bn) less than half its peak value of $23.8bn in 2011. Over the past two years, the company has been aggressively reviewing its enterprise-focused networking assets a place where it has thus far failed to gain much traction.
The proposed sale of the Junos Pulse mobile unit would put an end to Juniper's stated goal of capitalising on disruptive trends such as mobility and BYOD - a space where the company has sought to carve a niche with its Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite and other mobile offerings such as Junos Pulse Access Control Service/UAC and Junos Pulse Secure Access Service/SSL VPN.
Despite all of the recent activity, it remains unclear how the cuts and shifts will impact Juniper's loyal cadre of reseller partners. At its partner conference in January, Juniper unveiled a focused vision to provide underlying infrastructure for applications and data to interoperate in corporate, consumer and machine-to-machine contexts, areas where Juniper has fared better of late.
"Today is the network first and, when the history is written about the transformation it's going through, they will say this is when Juniper and its partners led the way," Juniper CEO Shaygan Kheradpir told solution providers in January.
Solution providers have consistently lauded Juniper for the quality of its products and the strength of its engagement with the channel. Juniper's channel programme, partners tell Channelnomics, has gone from one of the worst to one of the best in recent years. The challenge now, partners say, is finding a way to get customers to consider Juniper solutions over competitive offerings from Cisco and HP.
As part of our special editorial partnership. CRN is publishing this article from Channelnomics.