IBM bolsters Juniper partnership

NEW YORK: IBM announced yesterday it was stepping up its partnership with Juniper Networks Inc, but said it was also boosting ties with other equipment vendors including Cisco Systems Inc, playing down suggestions it was aiming to keep an increasingly competitive Cisco at bay.

International Business Machines Corp said it had agreed with Juniper on an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) partnership, under which IBM would rebrand Juniper's switches and routers as its own and sell them as part of its family of products.

IBM said the move was aimed at providing its customers, in particular corporate data centers dealing with increasingly high-volume network traffic, with a wider range of server, data storage, and networking equipment to choose from.