No surveyed CIOs actually plan to deploy either the top-of-rack QFX or the more complete QFabric Interconnect system in 2012, the UBS survey found.

“The challenge for Juniper is that other competitors continue to enhance their offerings including Cisco, Brocade, Arista, Dell/Force10, and others, while ,” Theodosopoulos states.

Huawei’s enterprise re-entry doesn’t scare Cisco, even though Cisco views Huawei, which competes on much lower price, as its toughest competitor and t. CEO John Chambers already said the Chinese company “doesn’t always play by the rules.” And at the recent Cisco Partner Summit, he and Executive Vice President Rob Lloyd had more critical observations of the company’s enterprise efforts.

“They’re coming after the networking channel and they’re finding that the interest from the Cisco networking channel is very low in the value proposition that they bring,” said Lloyd, who heads Cisco’s worldwide sales. “They are copying our [channel] program, they are emulating what we say to our partners, but what we deliver is based on trust and relationship and a deep understanding as to how the service model works, and that’s not the actual capability that Huawei brings. So we feel very encouraged that at this stage, the Cisco channel is rejecting the attention of Huawei and we’re very happy that they’re successful at the expense of our other competitors.”

Said Chambers: “Our win rate is going up pretty rapidly vs. Huawei. Cheap isn’t necessarily cheap. It’s what can you do to really change a marketplace.”