Networks, Apps Pull Together

These mergers are good news for the enterprise. They reduce the need to purchase point products from a variety of vendors, increasing your opportunity to partner with a single infrastructure provider for a number of different tools. Cisco, Juniper and now F5 can supply the components needed to speed consolidation in the data center and optimize connections with branch offices.

Additionally, these deals recognize the critical relationship between business apps and revenue. Infrastructure vendors not only want to facilitate the comings and goings of business apps and data on networks, they also want to accelerate and optimize app performance.

Finally, in bringing together network and app services, these vendors optimize application performance. Cisco is planning on doing so with its AON (Application Oriented Networking) strategy. Look for F5 and Juniper to follow suit.