Juniper and EMC both said they don't comment on "rumor or speculation." But given trends in the industry of giants looking to become one-stop IT shops, and recent events that support that trend, it's a plausible scenario.

EMC's VMware unit recently acquired network startup Nicira for $1.26 billion to fill out the network piece of its holistic cloud strategy, which includes storage, , network and virtualization. Parent EMC also aligned with server vendor Lenovo which, despite company assurances to the contrary, appears to conflict with an alliance with Cisco for servers.

EMC, VMware and Cisco, along with Intel, have a joint venture called VCE that sells pre-configured data center bundles - EMC storage, VMware virtualization and Cisco servers and switches - to IT shops. How that business has been doing since it was founded in 2010 has been hard to pin down - numerous requests by Network World to speak with CEO Praveen Akkiraju have been unfulfilled by VCE, yet there are reports that VCE is doing $1 billion in annual revenue yet is unprofitable.

But the joint venture seems to be unraveling given recent moves by EMC and VMware that appear to undermine Cisco's contribution to VCE. For its part, Cisco has embraced other virtualization hypervisors than VMware's - , Red Hat and Citrix. And there's speculation that Cisco spin-in Insieme Networks may be developing a storage component to replace EMC's, in addition to the programmable 100G Ethernet switches it's also believed to be building.

With EMC/VMware and Cisco fracturing, picking up Juniper for data center switching and cloud service provider routing could credibly replace Cisco and fill out EMC's one-stop storage/server/switching/virtualization IT and cloud fabric offering.