Juniper (JNPR) Teams Up With Red Hat Against Vendor Lock-In

Juniper Networks JNPR has extended its existing collaboration with Red Hat, Inc. RHT, world's leading provider of open source solutions, to provide a unified solution for enterprises to ease their process of adopting cloud-native platforms. This initiative will involve tighter integration of Red Hat OpenShift Container platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Juniper Contrail Enterprise Multicloud.

Move to Bridge an Important Industry Gap

IT organizations across the world are constantly under pressure to improve efficiency, agility and scalability of their services while simultaneously maintaining security and compliance. This creates the need for technologies like OpenStack for building a private cloud with which IT teams can keep the development of essential applications behind the firewall. Modern and innovative solutions, which help customers meet current and future requirements, can be held back by existing vendor lock-in that pushes customers into a rigid and expensive environment. These issues created a gap which gave Juniper Networks and Red Hat an excellent opportunity to design a solution aiming to mitigate the challenges. This solution can simultaneously manage IT teams’ connectivity, security and visibility, making it easier for enterprises to manage their hybrid or multicloud environments and avoid any vendor lock-in, thus expediting innovation.

OpenStack, OpenShift and Contrail Cloud:  Why a Tighter Integration is Important

Juniper believes that for the entire IT ecosystem to efficiently manage workload and run efficiently, network and security policy should remain out of the way of any cloud-based workload placement decision. Aiming to make this possible, last month, the company rolled out Contrail Enterprise Multi-Cloud, designed to simplify and accelerate safer deployment and operations of distributed and scalable clouds. As more and more customers are seeking to move away from the lock-in in systems like VMware’s NSX and Cisco’s ACI, the integration of Red Hat’s OpenStack and OpenShift Container platform into Juniper’s Contrail Enterprise Multi-cloud provides a more flexible, open-source based, multicloud alternative to the existing proprietary technologies.

Price Performance

In the past three months, Juniper has outperformed the industry on an average, yielding 4.2% return against a decline of 1.3% for the latter.

Zacks Rank and Stocks to Consider

Juniper currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the industry space are BlackBerry Limited BB, sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), and Motorola Solutions, Inc. MSI carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

BlackBerry has an expected long-term earnings growth rate of 18.6%.

Motorola has an expected long-term earnings growth rate of 8%.

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