Tech Rumor of the Day: Riverbed Angling for a Deal

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Cisco's (CSCO Quote) big data center partnership plan, known simply as its verbal invasion of the server market, hasn't quite toppled the industry yet, but it continues to kick up a dust storm of speculation.

For months, it was suspected that Hewlett-Packard (HPQ Quote) would counter the assault by acquiring Juniper (JNPR Quote), Cisco's direct rival in core Internet routing.

Meanwhile, Dell's (DELL Quote) threats about hitting the deal trail had industry watchers guessing that storage networking shop Brocade (BRCD Quote) might in the Dell expansion plan.

And F5 (FFIV Quote) has spent a fair amount of time in the deal buzz machine. The Web switch maker, which commands eye-popping 78% gross margins, has been seen as an accretive pickup option for giants like Cisco and H-P.

EMC's Cash Is King

But those rumors have grown a bit stale.

Some of these prospective deal stories have aged beyond ripeness. And newer items of speculation are smaller in comparison.

Riverbed(RVBD Quote), for example, an outfit that helps network operators speed up traffic by reducing the amount of repeat information that travels back and forth, has been considered an appealing takeover target for years. But Riverbed's so-called Web-optimizing technology has been imitated and developed enough by others like Cisco, to have dulled its appeal a bit.

The upshot of all this: Riverbed is apparently in acquisition mode. The tech shop is rumored to have an interest in Juniper's network optimization business, a unit formed when Juniper bought Peribit in 2005 for $337 million in cash. Today, analysts estimate the Peribit business is worth about a tenth of that.