Juniper Networks is laying off approximately 500 employees as part of a corporate restructuring effort -- 4% to 5% of the company's workforce.

Some industry insiders said the team responsible for Juniper's QFabric data center networking technology has been particularly targeted for staff reductions. The technology has received positive reviews, but uptake has been slow. Juniper recently added new components to QFabric to make it more affordable to midmarket enterprises.

The perception of slow uptake of QFabric is partially a consequence of Wall Street's impatience, according to Andre Kindness, senior analyst for Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.

"Networking personnel are probably the most conservative group in infrastructure operations," he said.

“Thus far, the availability of in-hardware multi-tenant network devices has been limited to mostly Layer 4 to Layer 7 products, such as Cisco's Adaptive Security Appliances and F5 Networks Inc.'s BIG-IP Viprion appliances...Mainstream availability and adoption of multi-tenant features in Layer 2 and Layer 3 devices are still a few years away”

 Many large enterprises, however, do need multi-tenant private cloud network capabilities, Kindness added. “Operations teams are already being split into workload-centric organizations, with multiple people [from different silos] coming together to support Oracle or an ERP[enterprise resource planning] program. These teams are being aligned to services.”

Enterprises can be very technology-siloed, said Andre Kindness, senior analyst for Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. The capability to automatically initiate virtual network services- - like WAN optimization -- is part of a larger trend where in the roles and capabilities of different teams within an enterprise are shifting.

“As networking becomes more advanced, IT needs the systems to start taking over.

The network touches everything, so every other team within IT has had to work with the networking administrators to get work done. Now, we are starting to see the baton moving between different teams within IT. The networking team now has the opportunity to empower other IT teams by automating some network components or handing off control of certain processes.”