Juniper focuses on high performance networking

Goa: Focusing on its high performance network products, investing in brand building exercises and further tapping the enterprise segment were some of the key strategies outlined by Juniper Networks during the J-Partner Summit held in Goa from May 26-28, 2009.

Having registered a 24 percent growth in revenues for the entire APAC region, Juniper will now help its select and reseller partners to graduate to the elite level, wherein the partners will focus more on high performance networking. Juniper partners, including resellers and select ones, have been focusing only on individual products and solutions. However, the vendor has now taken a conscious decision to help these partners graduate to elite level, wherein they do not restrict themselves only to technology or managed service providing, consulting and implementation, but also obtain the combined competency of technology and service offerings. Currently, 10 percent of Juniper's partners are selling its entire product portfolio and the vendor is also looking at tapping the remaining 90 percent. Juniper will now increase its partner base by another 10 percent.

Sharing his thoughts on the plans for the channel, Sanjiv Verma, Director-Enterprise & Channel Sales, Asean & India, Juniper mentioned, "We will continue to invest in partner programs in order to help our partners grow from being a mere technology partner to a combination of technology and service partner. We currently have around 120 reseller partners and 100 service partners in India. We are looking at having the least number of partners to cater to both the enterprise and service provider segment, and will add no more than 10 percent of the partners to our current partner base."

Additionally, the vendor is also looking at training partners to offer a host of business solutions.

"The incremental cost when it comes to offering more to an existing partner as opposed to making a new one is less, and hence we will enable our partners to offer a gamut of solutions and products that will reduce TCO for their existing customers and help the partners retain them. The way we are differentiating ourselves from competitors is that we are offering customers the right tools and services, and have also made additions to our existing portfolio," added Sanjay Jotshi, Director-Enterprise & Channels, India & SAARC, Juniper.

Jotshi further elaborated that in view of the global meltdown, the buyer has changed and the CFOs are making the imperative IT decisions. The partners thus need to take the solutions approach and extend business benefits to its customers.

Juniper will also invest heavily into the R&D activities in India, given that the company is looking at strengthening its position in the router, switching and security space.

While in the routing space, the company has recently added SRX 100, SRX 210, SRX 240 and SRX 650, in the switching space the company has added EX 8216 and EX 8208 in order to cater to the SMB and mid-market enterprises.

Giving an insight into their plans, Nagendra Venkaswamy, MD-India and SAARC, Juniper mentioned, "The addressable market size when it comes to switching, routing and security is around $12 billion for the APAC region. In addition, when it comes to services, business integration, consulting and support services are some of the areas which opens number of opportunities before the partners. The market size in here is around of $36 billion. Keeping the above in mind, we are eying the enterprise segment and will strengthen our position in the market further. We will also invest a further $400 million into the R&D activities that will include hiring more people and strengthening the proof of concept labs we have in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi."

Juniper will hence be eying the BFSI, IT, ITeS, government and PSUs for expanding its market further.

Sharing strategies for the SMB market, Verma elucidated, "The SMB enterprises offer a host of opportunities before us and hence we have laid down strategies, whereby we will have products that takes care of complexity and are low priced; at the same time they are tailor made aside to offering multiple functionality to the customers."

The above strategy will help partners to give their customers the best of the features at a competitive price that will, in the long run, imply reduced opex and low cost of ownership for their (customers) infrastructure.

Juniper will also increase its focus on data centers, and will hence offer a host of products and solutions to increase the capacity of data centers while using technological trends such as virtualization, consolidation and cloud computing. Juniper has recently announced a range of EX and SRX solutions to cater to the customers requirements. The vendor will make investments into the data centers, distributed enterprise and adaptive threat management solutions.

In order to enable their partners further, Juniper will impart training to its partners through the enhanced partner program and will offer certifications around advanced network infrastructure, network infrastructure and advanced security.

(The author was hosted in Goa by Juniper)