I think it’s another stupid merger for merger’s sake. The Juniper C-suite will make out like bandits, so will the Juniper shareholders. But in the long term… I suspect it will end up poorly. At this level, a 1% payout to the C-suite is just so much money it’s crazy. They get out happy, the rest get screwed.

Could be…. 🙂

Your story sounded awfully familiar, could it have been the Ascend-Lucent-Nexabit triangle?

The loan cost is kinda crazy, I imagine. Could be done with private equity, like Michael Dell did with EMC and VMware, and that did not turn out as hoped either. Well, except Dell and Silver Lake made some dough playing the Wall Street ponies.

In HPE’s defense, I think the Compaq deal saved the company, or at least the enterprise part of it. I always thought it was a good idea to marry the thing that printed money — the printer business — to the thing that thinks it does and never quite did — the 1U and 2U server business. HPE did indeed need a complete stack as it was trying to build, but it was just not possible to do so affordably. Some things maybe only build organically over a long period of time. I think Juniper and HPE are both grown up enough to do this, if they really want to do it.

In my case, we had a major product just about to be released, test instances in our customers were looking great. The future looked good for a company which basically dropped new models into the core of the network and pushed the old gear out to the edges. But kept the same management and provisioning software in place, which make changes like this trivial. Well, not trivial, but certainly less taxing.

Anyway, this startup with all kinds of golly-gee-whiz-bang powerpoint slides said their new switch would blow the socks off anything else, we just need some more cash to finish it. So the idiots in the C-suite bought them, cancelled our product and the had to cancel that new startup they just bought about twelve months later once they realized it was crap crap crap.

So my story doesn’t quite relate to this acquisition, but I can forsee alot of infighting on which product is kept, which is tossed and how many many many ways there are for this acquisition to go wrong, becuase the C-suite doesn’t have the technical chops to understand the issues and make logical decisions. I’m munching my metaphorical popcorn as I watch a train wreck coming to happen.

Color me skeptical about large mergers like this, especially when you need to take out large loans (and at what interest rate!) to finance the purchase. So cost cutting and “rationalization” of the portfolio will happen, and drastically I bet. Whcih will piss off customers. Maybe they don’t want to goto Cisco, but maybe they have to?

Hopefully I’m wrong.