Given its track record, you would think that Juniper Networks would be loath to spend over half-a-billion dollars on two start-ups. Still, it shows if it wants to stay in the game, it needs to rev-up the acquisition engine, and take the likes of Cisco head on, and not just in routers. Today Juniper acquired Peribit Networks and Redline Networks for $337 million and $132 million in cash, stock and assumed stock options. It had dropped major dinero on NetScreen, in case you had forgotten, in an effort to buy its way into the security space. Now its going after application acceleration and switching markets. Not a good sign for the likes of F5, Foundry, and start-ups looking to get some traction. Some of them were thought to be on JNPR shopping list. Scott Kirens talked about his vision of “intelligent infrastructure” last year and this is continuation of that theme.

Investing Money: JNPR paid a steep price to enter this market as these companies combined revenues last year was roughly $40M. But this is where the money is being spent by enterprises large and small and this is where the next-gen enterprise networking is heading. There had been talks of JNPR acquiring FFIV- this certainly will put an end to that and make life of FFIV little tougher as Redline had already been giving hard time to FFIV.