Cisco Spending Millions of Dollars Secretly Purchasing New Juniper Products

FrankPoole (1736680) writes According to a CRN investigative report, Cisco has been spending millions of dollars over several years to secretly purchase Juniper Networks' products, including new QFabric and MX series routers, for use in its 'competitive analysis lab,' where the products are tested and reverse engineered. According to the report, some of the Juniper products purchased by Cisco were still in beta and not yet commercially released. In addition, CRN discovered that a main source for Cisco to obtain these Juniper products was, ironically, a company called Torrey Point Group, a fast-growing VAR that was awarded Juniper's Part of the Year in 2011.

Twas Ever Thus

[necro81]

As soon as you start putting something on the market, especially if you are not selling directly to the end customer (i.e., through a distributor or VAR), you have to assume that your competitors are going to get ahold of your products. Expect them to be reverse engineered. Trade Secrets do not exist once it's out in the wild.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if Cisco didn't have this stuff. I would also be surprised if Juniper didn't have Cisco products.

Re:And..

[RobWright]

I wrote the article. First, I can tell you unequivocally that the Snowden disclosures had nothing to do with this article. Furthermore, I don't think the article makes a judgment about Cisco's part in this matter; in fact, the article cites a legal expert in tech IP who explicitly states that Cisco's actions are in no way illegal (even if the product was procured before it was commercially available) and that buying your competitor's works for testing and reverse engineering is a required practice in the industry and "part of what makes markets work." Second, I take issue with your characterization of the article as spin, and your assertion that fair articles don't get page views. Lastly, I get the distinct feeling that you did not read the article. I may be wrong about that, and if so, I apologize for the incorrect assumption. But given your claim that the article is Snowden-inspired when there's no mention of the NSA or Snowden in the article (not to mention the article is more about Torrey Point Group and Juniper than Cisco), surely you can understand why I made the assumption.