Juniper pledges further investment in partner community

Juniper Networks is stepping up its partner commitment through expanding its portfolio and increasing the amount of programs available to partners.

"Many of our partners have invested quite a bit of time and money in building their practice around Juniper and we want to ensure they'll continue to do that," vice-president of channel sales APAC, Gary Kinsley, said. "We have a strategy to continue to grow our business, take market share and move into new markets. We'll give our partners guidance on where that is, so they can skill up accordingly."

Kinsley explained Juniper has a different types of programs for different partners.

"We've got programs specifically for our distributors that we'll continue to develop, evolve and try to help them become more efficient with their business," he said.

Kinsley said his prime focus was to ensure Juniper partners were certified and trained across the entire product portfolio. In Asia-Pacific Juniper has 2500 partners. About 1300 partners transact on a regular basis.

Earlier this month, the vendor launched its Learning Academy, which provides an easier route for partners to get skilled up in certain Juniper technologies.

"What we had before was haphazard. In the past, when you went on to the partner centre, you had to figure out what training you needed to do a networking or switching certification," he said. " The Learning Academy is much easier and will advise you on what you need to learn to gain that certification. It will recommend a curriculum for you based on what you already know and what you don't know, so you can customise it."

Juniper will also launch its datacentre initiative that will tie in with new product announcements, Kinsley said. Further details will be revealed later in the year.

"There are new designs and products coming out around datacentres and there will be associated training for partners on that," he said.

Juniper head of service provider channel and managed services worldwide, Lori Cornmesser, said it was looking to expand its managed services reach into new market areas through its partnerships.

"The dynamics of managed services are changing. the whole challenge is that you've got to start becoming more innovative and still drive profit," Cornmesser said. "There are different ways people are applying managed services through things like private and public clouds, and so on. With our managed services program - it's about the partners. We're going to give them all the tools and assets to help get them to market faster based on Juniper.

"There's going to be interesting trends happening in managed services in the evolution of where some of these solutions go."

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