This is from Juniper's board - they are having massive layoffs this week because of this.
A decline in data center hardware spending by major cloud providers could be more than a temporary blip for major networkers like Juniper Networks.
That’s the view of some analysts and company insiders, who suggest that years-long strategic plans by cloud providers have culminated in in-house production of networking tools they once purchased from the likes of Juniper, Cisco and other networkers.
Last week, Juniper Networks announced its third quarter revenue would be lower than anticipated, hampered by a slowdown in sales of equipment to cloud providers.
The story of Juniper Networks’ QFX switches offers a glimpse into potentially profound changes buffeting the relationships between IT hardware vendors and big cloud players who have become some of their most important customers.
“AWS is backing off on buying Juniper for their own reasons,” said one former employee with deep knowledge of the business relationship between Juniper and AWS. “They were buying a special build of the Juniper QFX switch to do an L3 IP Clos, which is their data center fabric architecture.”
The former employee – who now works at another channel vendor – spoke to MSPmentor on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t sanctioned to discuss the deal.
“Amazon now builds their own switch,” he explained. “They featured it in a keynote at (AWS re:Invent 2016) last November, which I attended.”
View the full keynote: