Several investment firms issued bulletins following Network World's story that Juniper may be downsizing for a potential sale, that it has hired an investment banking firm to evaluate bids for the company, and that EMC . The story , a recent report from investment firm ISI Group, and internal contacts as its sources.

FABRIC WARS:  

Many bulletins stated that Juniper may indeed be prepared to entertain offers due to , but most also doubted that EMC would consider acquiring the company.

"Given recent execution challenges at , we don't doubt that it may be contemplating a sale," writes Amitabh Passi of UBS. "However, we remain skeptical of an EMC-Juniper tie-up especially given Juniper's struggles in enterprise switching (including fabrics) and , and the recent ."

The rationale for EMC's purported interest in Juniper would be to become a single source of integrated, fabric-woven storage, servers, networking and virtualization to IT shops. Juniper would replace Cisco as EMC's network infrastructure provider given an apparent rift in the .