Implied Positioning: Arista, Cisco, Extreme, and Juniper.
What might reasonably be implied from copy.
Analysis
It is not surprising that many technology suppliers would position themselves as innovative, forward-thinking, shapers of the future. This can be recognized to lessor or greater extents in all the suppliers analyzed. The interesting observations lay in the nuanced differences.
For two of the suppliers analyzed, the words seem to match exactly what you might expect: Arista’s technology leadership in cloud networking, and Cisco’s unified, solutions-oriented approach, across multiple aspects of IT. While I will comment a little more on Arista and Cisco in the full report, in this analysis summary, I find Extreme and Juniper to be of specific interest.
Extreme for the overall impression it gives of focus on specific verticals, and an approach to operations that appears intended to be channel friendly, and appears to be appealing to mid-market and SME/SMBs (though no doubt, over many decades Extreme has developed many Enterprise customers as well).
For Juniper, the company that was once viewed as being almost primarily a Service Provider focused company, its positioning is very much focused on Enterprise. Knowing the strategic rationale for this, we would have to say Juniper is doing a fairly good job of reflecting in copy, what has been a major multi-year pivot towards growth in Enterprise.
The primary focus in this article is on whether the positioning is clear, not whether it is the “correct” positioning. On that score, vendors analyzed get good grades. On the question of whether positioning is different from other competitors, vendors also get reasonable to good grades.
Background
Marketing copy implies what the head of the Marketing function, and arguably the CEO, wants to project as the positioning of the company and its products. As I noted in my recent article, copy is to positioning, what execution is to strategy - not something separate - but something intimately entwined.
This analysis of four Network Equipment Suppliers, Arista, Cisco, Extreme, and Juniper, is the first of many such analysis, across multiple technology sectors. The same principles of analysis apply to any company, any sector.
Summary Table
The below summary table does not necessarily reflect the positioning a company believes it is achieving through its marketing copy, merely the positioning our methodology implies from the copy.