Juniper increases education play

Juniper Networks is increasing its education and training push by partnering with newly-established Sydney-based Training IT Professionals.

Visiting vice-president of customer services, Sander Dales, said the vendor is focusing on education and training programs.

“We’re also looking at significantly reshaping, investing and driving that even harder in 2009, through creating a far closer alignment between our technical and sales education groups internally,” he said. “We’ll adapt the portfolio into a more modular training portfolio that’s closer aligned from sales, to pre-sales and all the way through to our technical and post-sales skills for our partners.”

Dales indicated Juniper aims to globally reach 100,000 certified technical experts by the end of 2010. Under its Fast Track certification program, the vendor has 35,680 global enrolments and 1150 of those are in the A/NZ region.

“There’s been a significant uptake and it’s a great way of reducing the barrier to gaining Juniper expertise,” Dales said. “It’s not just from a cost perspective, but it also allows people to do this in their own time and gain some theoretical knowledge.”

Dales said the new partnership with Training IT Professionals complemented its current relationship with Crystal Echo.

“Their practice is very committed to training partners and we see this as a long-term method to market,” he said. “We’ve got a very strong commitment to running training across the A/NZ region.”

Earlier this year, the vendor also signed up with North Sydney Institute and RMIT.

Training IT Professionals established its North Sydney training centres last month. The organisation has set-up a Juniper lab, which features switching, routing and WAN acceleration products. Director, Alex Lopez, said Juniper was the company’s first vendor partner to come on-board and it would run Juniper training courses nationally. It also works closely with Juniper’s distributors including Avnet Technology Solutions, Ingram Micro and Westcon Group.

“We’ve invested a lot of money in building labs and training rooms and we know it’s a long-term value,” he said. “We have built the infrastructure and we're talking to more vendors. We can provide them with more specific and tailored training courses.”