Juniper will spend up to $4 billion for absorption

The Juniper company is interested in carrying out target acquisitions, especially in the field of mobile communication and cloud computing, the head of the company Kevin Johnson told, speaking at a conference in Hong Kong.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Johnson said that Juniper could implement transactions on acquisition if found the companies which have products having "a strategic alignment" on products of Juniper company. He also added that Juniper "is open" for offers on purchase of the Asian companies.

Juniper has $2.72 billion cash, $632.4 million more in short-term investments and $775.4 million in the long-term investments. The company also has a long-term debt about $1 billion. Thus, the capital is $4.13 billion in money and their equivalent. However, considering uncertainty in economy, Juniper will hardly invest all money in one big deal.

Nevertheless, some quite large deals are possible. Juniper can purchase Mellanox Technologies dominating in the Ethernet market and adapters of the main bus InfiniBand. What is even more important in the light of the events - in November of last year Mellanox completed hard work on acquisition of Voltaire company for $128 million.

But if Juniper is interested in space for InfiniBand or adapters for servers, then it is better for it to hurry: the software giant Oracle acquired in addition some part of shares of Mellanox.

The Mellanox company has market capitalization in the amount of $1.24 billion. Within the last two quarters when data of Voltaire were included into the reporting of Mellanox, she received $118.4 million revenue and $1.2 million net profit. At the same time lost $1.62 million in the first quarter when purchased Voltaire, and in the second got profit in the amount of $2.85 million. At with Oracle there can be a trade war. At this Mellanox Juniper in the amount about $1.6 billion can manage.

The same treats QLogic which is the second and only supplier in the market of integrated microcircuits for InfiniBand and switches, and has market capitalization in $1.35 billion Juniper will be able to dare to purchase QLogic which has a big business selling the Fibre Channel switches for connection of servers with SAN networks and also the InfiniBand switches for supercomputers and other parallel systems, she takes part in the market of the products Ethernet as its product UA5900 announced a few weeks ago in addition to normal traffic can process also traffic 10GE.

The product line of QLogic has a little less intersections with the products Juniper, than at Mellanox. And transaction potential between QLogic and Juniper could be financially more attractive, than in a case with Mellanox. QLogic has $606.2 million income for the last four quarters and it got $146.1 million profit.

Considerable part of business of Juniper company is the share of sales of routers to telecom operators and other suppliers of network services so one of options of potential acquisition that Juniper could invest in niche products which provide to the company value added of about $70 million. For example, the SMobile Systems company purchased in July, 2010 which sells the software of security for smartphones and tablets running iOS, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

One more option of investments which Juniper could implement is similar to Akeena Networks purchased for $100 million in April, 2010. This company developed a stack of stream multimedia and the software of content delivery. And in November of last year Juniper bought company assets of Blackwave, other supplier of a streaming video. Transaction amount is not disclosed.

In addition, Juniper has claims on corporate data processing centers and campuses where its business is less developed. Therefore in December of last year it purchased Altor Networks, software provider of the systems of protection of virtual servers for $95 million and a month earlier paid $152 million for Trapeze Networks, software provider of management of wireless local area networks.