The partnership, made up of virtualization software vendor VMware, storage management vendor EMC (which owns 85% of VMWare) and Cisco, the world’s leading computer networking company, is made up of a Virtual Computing Environment coalition to develop new products and Acadia, a joint venture for training customers and partners on how to install and use the products.

The announcement is considered by the industry as a direct challenge to HP and IBM and Dell as the leading providers of storage and computing platforms for server virtualization and secondarily to Microsoft as the published to Hyper-V virtualization platform.

With that, Juniper unveiled its strategy for opening and licensing its JUNOS operating system to developers and partners. It also rolled out a new generation of processors, called Trio, designed to massively scale the edge of the service provider network. It also introduced new MX-series Ethernet edge routers with “3D” scaling of bandwidth, subscribers and services.

In addition, Juniper disclosed Project Falcon, an initiative to develop products for the mobile packet core and subscriber management of 4G networks, as well as “universal edge” applications integrating wireline and wireless networks.

Lastly, Juniper provided an update on its Stratus cloud computing project that included three steps to cloud-enable a data center: simplify the environment through a unified fabric managed as a single switch; sharing resources through virtual partitioning and VPLS; and securing the environment with security policies based on the new JUNOS Space platform and enhancements to Juniper’s SRX Services Gateway.