Juniper Networks is looking to prop up its cloud capabilities by buying enterprise cloud storage vendor HTBASE for an undisclosed sum.
As Juniper transitions away from hardware-only revenues, it's looking to branch out into other areas, but so far the cloud has been a difficult nut to crack. In Juniper's third-quarter earnings call, CEO Rami Rahim said the company was seeing some challenges in the market, particularly within the cloud vertical where customers' deployments are moving more slowly than Juniper anticipated, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.
HTBASE, which was founded three years ago and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, will add its software-defined enterprise multicloud storage platform into Juniper's Contrail Enterprise Multicloud once the deal closes in the fourth quarter.
Its platform was designed to make the complete infrastructure layer—compute, storage and networking—transparent to applications without having an impact on the operating systems or architectures. With HTBASE, enterprises can move their workloads to multicloud environments without porting or lock-in on a single stack.
Juniper said it also expects its customers to benefit from HTBASE’s extensible platform and its composable system that enables software elements to be reused and extended.
Using its own API, HTBASE's JUKE platform offers a storage layer across multiple clouds and local infrastructure for distributed applications. JUKE enables operators to scale nodes across multiple clouds while presenting them as a single local infrastructure, according to HTBASE's web site. HTBASE lists Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, machine containers and OpenShift as its primary use cases.
While hybrid cloud providers bond public and private clouds together through orchestration, multicloud uses at least two cloud computing platforms for specific workloads without orchestration between them. Cisco, IBM and Red Hat are among the multicloud players
"Companies are moving more workloads from on-premises to the cloud to keep up with the need for agility and more flexibility. It’s up to us to make this transition not only achievable, but more importantly, to focus on making the move to the multicloud simple,” said Rahim, in a prepared statement. “Juniper is betting big on multicloud and the momentum is mounting every day. Together with HTBASE, we have an opportunity to shape a new and emerging market that will deliver significant value with a unique line of products to customers worldwide.”
In its most recent third quarter, Juniper's cloud revenues were down 28% year-over-year and 11% sequentially. For the three months that ended Sept. 30, Juniper reported net revenues of $1.179 billion, which was down 6% year-over-year and 2% from the previous quarter.