Flying With Friends

At a time when most vendors are busy expanding their channel network and
bringing more partners on board, Juniper Networks is all set to buck the trend.
Instead the company is happy with the critical mass it has reached in terms of
its channel and will work with the partners it already has rather than add more
to this league.

The idea is to grow with the partners, not create unnecessary competition,
revealed the company, at the recently concluded APAC J-Partner Summit 2006 in
Bangkok. In fact the underlying message that was flashed to the channel
throughout the event was, 'accelerate your business.'

“Our strategy to reach the market is 100% through partnering and we have no
aspiration to change that. We want to grow with our partners,” commented Eddie
Munshull, executive VP, Worldwide Field Operations, Juniper Networks.

This was a major point that was stressed upon during the three-day summit.
Gary Kinsley, VP-Channels APAC, Juniper, said, “We want to work with partners
to encourage business as well as help them grow their product portfolio.”

Juniper Networks, which is involved in enabling secure and assured
communications over a single IP network, recently announced the appointment of
2,200 plus partners in APAC, 100 of them in India, and said it had attained
'critical mass', translated which means that they have sufficient number of
partners to attain their business objectives. Its channel program has been
running for the past two years and in the duration the company had been
aggressively ramping up its focus on the enterprise segment.

The J-Partner Program enables and rewards partners for delivering business
critical networking and security solutions. It helps partners in marketing and
supports them financially.

Today, one third of Juniper customers are from the enterprise segment, over
900 customers worldwide, as opposed to carrier customers.

Growth Strategy

The company is insistent that over-distribution would be harmful for the
growth of the channel and would lead to unhealthy competition amongst them. The
Juniper partnership advantage ensures that a minimum number of partners are
selected for maximum coverage and revenue.

“Partners too look for value proposition in a partnership. Fewer partners
mean margins are protected. While this strategy would give rise to competitors,
data shows otherwise. We are winning market shares as per various industry
analysts such as Gartner,” reasoned Kinsley.

In stride to grow with the partners, the company offers strong partner
support in the form of market development fund (MDF), or financial support. MDF,
which steadily increases y-o-y, helps the partners to expand Juniper presence in
their markets. Support also comes in the form of education programs. Another big
support partners get is in the form of tools that help, them understand hidden
costs that come with deploying the solution and helps them over come that.

“We work with tools and models to do analysis thus helping carriers and
solution providers to become profitable,” remarked Keith Falter, financial and
business analysis, Juniper.

Juniper claims to be the only one left standing at the $2 bn plus revenue
bracket. Cisco seems to be the only other company giving some kind of
competition to Juniper.

“More and more people are now seeing us as a likely alternative to Cisco,
with no other players at this level,” commented Lindholm. Today, one third of
Juniper business comes from the enterprise segment but the company is looking
forward to enhancing this ratio.

Speaking further about the company's target Lindholm said, “We want to
establish Juniper as a thought leader in open IP. Our areas of focus are the
existing customers. Key verticals that we want to focus on are financial
services, governments and R&D.”

Ruth Samson

mail@dqindia.com

(The writer was hosted in Bangkok by Juniper Networks)