Juniper and IBM's decision to enter into an OEM agreement will allow IBM to provide Juniper's Ethernet networking products and support within IBM's data centre portfolio of products.
Scott Janney, director strategic alliances at Juniper Networks, told CRN in an interview, the deal offers a new route to the enterprise market for Juniper.
"IBM and Juniper share a common vision to continually evolve information infrastructure as a strategic element of business success," he said.
"It can now combine Juniper's infrastructure to support its application and services, providing their customers with the best choices for transforming their data centre.
"This [makes] it easier to deploy and deliver applications and services, lower TCO and improve the user experience."
Janney said Juniper had been taking share from Cisco in the enterprise market for several years.
"We have been steadily gaining momentum, especially in the switching and routing space," he said.
"What this agreement really signals to the market is that IBM is making a long term commitment to Juniper's vision, products and technology."
The vendor anticipates the agreement will be complementary to its existing channel strategy.
"This agreement should have no bearing on our current J-Partners," said Janney.
"All J-Partners are free to develop and pursue any data centre opportunities with end customers in an open competition environment based on their unique skills.
"We anticipate that IBM will focus its efforts on comprehensive data centre apps as part of an end to end solution."
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