Cisco vs Juniper: Why Cisco in 2024

Cisco and Juniper are the two heavy hitters in the networking infrastructure realm. Both vendors offer a wide range of solutions to meet any organization's needs. However, the amount of technology provided by both vendors may make deciding which is best for you challenging.

Juniper offers highly scalable routers and switches at a competitive price. Cisco offers an entire ecosystem of hardware and software — from routers to telephony technology all the way to cloud SaaS. While there may be some situations where Juniper is the preferred vendor, this post will focus on why Cisco is generally the better bet.

Cisco: Undisputed King of Market Share

It is no secret that Cisco has the largest market share out of any networking vendor out there. Cisco is almost ubiquitous with routers and switches; it is nearly a household name. Their vast degree of success is not a coincidence. Cisco has consistently provided quality networking software to its clients.

In 2022, Cisco's market share of the enterprise network infrastructure was a massive 41% according to Statista. Its next closest competitor is Huawei with a paltry 10% of the market share.

Moreover, Cisco has been participating in a vast amount of acquisitions. There have been 11 acquisitions in 2023 alone (compared to only 2 acquisitions in 2022), ranging from security to education sectors. All the acquisitions are sure to diversify their product line and further increase their technological footprint.

If you are considering choosing Cisco, this is of great benefit to you. All of these acquisitions translate to an increase in the amount of goods and services you can obtain from one vendor. That means less shopping around and a streamlined software acquisition process for your organization.

Lastly, having a strong and diverse market share entails sustainability. By choosing Cisco, you can safely assume the products and services acquired will be supported for the foreseeable future. Unlike other vendors, you won't have to worry about Cisco getting bought out or going out of business. Speaking of support, let's discuss why Cisco's top-tier support is another reason you should choose Cisco in 2024.

Cisco's Level of Support

Due to Cisco's time and size in the market, they have an unprecedented level of support. The level of support is measured in two ways here. First, by the amount of help that can be found both by Cisco and on the internet. Second, by the amount of employees who are qualified to work on Cisco solutions. Let's walk through the first one of those options now.

Cisco Has an Active Community

It is no secret that configuring routers, switches, and networking hardware can lead to issues. One of the great things about Cisco is that many people have configured their hardware. That means it is fairly easy to find the issue you are running into by running it through a search engine. Compared to other networking solutions, their list of search results is far, far higher.

For example, searching for Cisco tags on StackOverflow yields nearly 1,000 results, while searching for a Juniper tag is almost 10 times less than that. To boot, this is just one website where the questions were tagged. Cisco eclipses its competitors in search engine results on questions.

This is a big deal. Time is money, and it is necessary to find the right answer quickly to get a network up and running. Using a vendor with a vibrant, active community is critical to streamlining the activation and troubleshooting process.

A Wide Pool of Potential Employees

One of the hardest parts about working in the IT field is finding qualified experts to manage, maintain, and troubleshoot the technology. That means the more popular the technology, the more experts you will be able to find to maintain it. By choosing Cisco you will have the widest pool of employees to choose from.

Cisco provides several highly sought-after certifications such as the CCNA and CCIE. These are considered industry standards and are by far the most common certifications professionals will obtain. After all, they know that Cisco is the most common networking solution, so they are hedging their bets. On the other hand, if you choose an alternative vendor, it will be very difficult to find qualified technicians.

The Cisco Ecosystem

Cisco Systems are not just routers and switches. While they compose a sizable amount of Cisco's market share, they offer so much more. This is a great advantage to choosing Cisco, because of their all-in-one packages of providing software and hardware solutions.

For instance, by choosing Cisco, you can get routers, switches, VoIP phones, and several software solutions. Software such as Jabber and WebEx will be at your disposal; software that's played a critical role during the pandemic. Unlike Cisco's competitors, the amount of hardware you can get will be limited to ethernet-centric items such as routers and switches. This leaves it up to you to find viable telephonic and VoIP solutions.

Cisco is also cloud-ready. They offer solutions to integrate with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or even a private cloud. Cisco has been heaping tons of capital into this initiative, so you can rest assured that there will be a secure solution that will meet your organization's needs. Speaking of security, let's touch on why Cisco is a great option from a security standpoint.

Cisco is Secure

Cisco products are known to provide consistent network security.  However, their market share has expanded past just network infrastructure. That means they need to take that same security standard and put it into the cloud. One of Cisco's best security features is for cloud migration computing, and it's called Cisco Cloudlock.

Cloudlock is a cloud-native cloud access security broker (CASB). It protects your data using APIs to identify and mitigate risks to your cloud ecosystem. If your organization is planning to move to the cloud with Cisco, you would be remiss to opt out of this software.

Not only does Cisco provide the latest and greatest software, they are a secure company in general. Cisco won an SC Media award for Best Security Company in 2021. This shows that Cisco is shoring up its existing technology, and software like Cloudlock shows they are striking into the future to provide security in different pieces of their market share.

Final Thoughts

We talked about how Cisco's size will help your organization ramp up faster. This post also touched on how it is far easier to find Cisco experts than it is to find Huawei or Juniper experts, for example. Additionally, there are far more resources online to assist in troubleshooting issues that will inevitably arise.

Next, we described how Cisco is a one-stop shop to fit your networking needs. They have VoIP phones, chat software, video software, and more at your disposal. Lastly, we touched on how seriously Cisco takes security.

It is safe to say that every organization is different, therefore every IT networking solution will be different. However, in most cases, Cisco will be your best bet — certainly if you are a mid to large-sized company