Juniper's growth strategy unveiled

How has been the performance of the company in the last fiscal?
Juniper Networks is on an upswing, technologically
speaking and with regard to its market strategy,
coming at the back of two key announcements recently
(QFabric and its new PTX Supercore switch) and a
record financial performance—Q4 2010 growth of 26%
and an annual growth of 23%. The way we are playing
our game, it clearly shows that we are quite ahead of
our competitors in the marketplace.

The QFabric is a result of a reportedly $100 mn
R&D investment. It is a new architecture for
data center infrastructure that will boost data
center throughput ten-fold and scale 12 times
larger than conventional architectures. QFabric
is designed for high-performance 10GB data
center, cloud deployments and for compute
intensive DC environments including highfrequency
trading (HFT) environments and
high-performance computing (HPC) wanting to
reduce latency by 85%.

On the other hand, the PTX Supercore is
expected to reduce the amount of hardware
needed to run networks and is a cost-effective
solution that reduces complexity while building
in the scalability needed to quickly adjust to
unforeseen traffic demands.

The company believes that these two developments,
along with its strong foothold and
unique platform offering among other core
areas like advanced network equipment and
mobile security, will significantly grow its market
opportunity in the next three-five years. Globally,
the company has said its market is likely to grow
from $41 bn in 2010 to $66 bn in 2013.

With these strong products, are you targeting only the large enterprises? Are you also looking at
some of the other industry verticals?
As always with networking, the basic technology is
horizontal. It is equally relevant to all the enterprises.
However, certain vertical enterprises are better
positioned to reap benefits out of it. There are
three early adopters of our technology—government
and defense, banking and finance, and the BPO
sector. All these sectors make huge investments in networking equipment.

Enterprises, per say, have brought extensive growth
for Juniper because they always look for cutting-edge
technologies. We see SMB as an area which is growing
very fast. In India, we plan to introduce a strong
portfolio of products through which we are looking at
becoming their first choice. However, things are still
in the planning stage and in the next few months, we
will be launching some comprehensive solutions that
would cater to this segment. This is clearly the segment
that we want to go after.

How well are you prepared to tackle the competition in the Indian market?
Juniper has strong reasons for optimism about its India
business as well. As a company it has scaled up and
changed its market perception from being known as
only a box seller with an inadequate portfolio limiting
to routers, switches and data center solutions to
an organization that provides comprehensive and
integrated networking solutions for data centers,
campuses, branch networks and wireless networks. To
its advantage, it also has the opportunity to target the
enterprise network segment which constitutes 74% of
the total data networking market of $1 bn.

With such a wide array of products, how are you engaging with your channel partners in India?
Juniper has 950 registered channel partners in India.
Besides India, our channel partners are spread across
Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives and Sri Lanka. Juniper
globally follows a 100% indirect model to sell their
solutions.

Distributors and partners are categorized
under—SP (service provider) alliances,
wherein globally NSN and Ericsson are our SPs;
Global alliances, wherein IBM and Dell are our
Global alliances; Country specific alliances like
Wipro, AGC, HCL, Datacraft, and Intec; and
Resellers who are regional partners spanning
across states, cities, and specific regions. The
main distributors of our solutions in India are
Ingram Micro, Avnet, and Transition.

We work 100% through channel partners
and we remain committed to this model of
doing business, unlike some of the other
players in the industry who in the quest
for seeking growth are now eating into our
channel partners ecosystem. We have never
taken this approach in the market. What we
have seen is that if our channel partners are
successful, we will taste success. There has to
be a win-win situation for both parties. We
always encourage our channel partners to
increase their value addition.

Besides, we also want our customers to
benefit and hence, we ensure that they get
proper value proposition out of our products
and solution set. We also want to increase the
‘consideration rate’ among customers so that chances
of our products being picked by them increases. One
thing that we are doing at Juniper is that anyone who
is considering to purchase our data center network,
we invite them at Juniper and make sure he purchases
our product.