Network equipment maker Juniper NX is ready to buy other companies

Juniper NX, a network equipment maker, is poised to buy other companies.

At a meeting in Hong Kong in Monday, Kevin Johnson, chief executive of Juniper, said the company was interested in a number of targeted acquisitions, especially in the area of mobile communications and cloud computing.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Johnson responded to a questioner's question by saying that if the target company was "strategically aligned" with Juniper's current switch and routing products and Roadmap, Juniper would make acquisitions. He added that he was "very happy" with the acquisition opportunities in Asia.

As the foreign media previously reported, Juniper sits on a large amount of cash (2.72 billion dollars). The company also has 632.4 million of dollars in short-term investments and 777.5 million of dollars in long-term investments. The company won a 1 billion dollar long-term investment in a debt financing earlier this year, mainly because interest rates are lower today. In other words, Johnson can use 4.13 billion of dollars in cash and cash equivalents for the takeover battle – despite the uncertain economic outlook, Juniper does not seem likely to put the money on a big takeover.

But some relatively large acquisitions are still possible. There are two more obvious takeover targets that are not Asian companies at all.

Juniper is likely to acquire Mellanox Technologies, which has a dominant position in the market for Ethernet and Inifiniband host bus adapters. This market is a major market in the InfiniBand switch field and is a rapidly growing segment of the Ethernet sector.

More importantly, Mellanox bought Voltaire at a cost of 128 million dollars last November, introducing SWITHX network chips that can handle Ethernet, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel transmission, and the third generation of ConnectX-3-compatible adapters.

Mellanox just released 345,000 new shares on Wall Street and received 104.1 million dollars in funding. The money will be used for corporate operations and potential acquisitions.

Software giant Oracle has made some Mellanox shares, so if Juniper is interested in InfiniBand domain or server adapters, it's best to move quickly.

Mellanox's market capitalisation is $1.24 billion trillion, fully within Juniper's acquisition budget. In the past two quarters, when Voltaire's performance was merged into Mellanox's financial statements, Voltaire brought in 118.4 million dollars in revenue and 1.2 million dollars in net income. In the first quarter of the acquisition of Voltaire, Mellanox lost $1.62 million trillion, while earning 2.85 million dollars in the second quarter.

If calculated at a premium of 20%--and possibly a takeover battle with Oracle--the cost of--juniper acquisition of Mellanox could reach $1.6 billion. According to Mellanox's June 2011 forecast, Juniper is likely to receive an annual increase of $250 million trillion in sales and a net profit of $100.015 billion. (Of course, Mellanox will want to do better). According to current Wall Street valuations, the patent value of SWICHX and CONNECTX products can largely compensate for Mellanox's acquisition costs.

Another is QLogic, which is currently the sole supplier of the InfiniBand ASIC and the switching market, with a value of USD 1.35 billion. Juniper can also afford to buy qlogic.qlogic a large part of the business is to sell the server to the San (storage LAN) Fibre Channel switch and the InfiniBand switch for supercomputers and other parallel systems. The UA9500 series Fibre Channel overhead switches that the company has just launched a few weeks ago can also handle 10GE (10gb/sec Ethernet) Transmissions if customers wish.

QLogic product lines and juniper products overlap less than mellanox. Acquiring QLogic may be more financially appealing than buying Mellanox. QLogic has a revenue of 606.2 million dollars in the past four quarters and 146.1 million dollars in the last quarter.

A large part of Juniper's business is to sell routers to telecom operators and other service providers, so Juniper's alternative idea may be to acquire smaller niche products while these base products can add value to juniper customers-for example, Juniper bought Smobile Bae at a cost of 70 million dollars in July 2010, the product of which is security software for smartphones and tablets (operating systems that can be iOS, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile).

Juniper bought Akeena NX at a cost of 100 million dollars in April 2010, a streaming media and content transfer software company. This is the type of acquisition that Juniper is willing to undertake. Juniper also bought blackwave assets last November, the latter being another video streaming company, which is unknown.

Juniper is also interested in the company's data center and campus business, which currently has a relatively small business. So Juniper bought Altor NX at $95 million last December, the product of which is security software for virtual servers, and last November, Juniper paid 152 million dollars to buy trapeze NX, A Wireless LAN management software company.

With 4.1 billion dollars in cash in hand, Juniper has a lot of options, not limited to Asian--jhonson the answer to that question is Asia, so his answer is Asia.

Juniper will not buy consumer electronics companies – which is certain.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)