The oft touted move by Cisco’s big rival in the router market, Juniper Networks, has finally happened and it now has its own range of enterprise switches to offer firms. But seeing as Cisco has seen off most competing vendors in the past, it is hard to
tell how seriously it will rate this latest move as competition.

It took HP numerous attempts to break into the enterprise switch market before its ProCurve offering finally saw success, even if the vendor was helped by 3Com’s disastrous move out of the enterprise switch market in 2000.

Cisco will no doubt be hoping that Juniper’s move suffers a similar fate and falls flat, or results in the second-best scenario – taking market share from other Cisco competitors.

Juniper’s switches appear to be premium kit and worth a look by IT buyers, but the big question is whether firms will be willing to give it a chance. Risk minimisation is such an ingrained part of IT managers, it is probably in their DNA.