“Our focus is on increasing the consideration rate of our products amongst customers”

How has
been the performance of the company in the last fiscal year?

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 high frequency 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 vertical?

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.