Juniper Networks has reassured its partners the company is focusing on the enterprise market to achieve further growth as a networking specialist, at its Asia-Pacific partner conference in Thailand last week.
Following last year’s initiative to focus inwards and centre attention around enterprise and carrier markets, Juniper currently leads the secure sockets layer virtual private network and standalone firewalls market segments.
Gary Kinsley, Juniper’s Hong-Kong-based vice president for enterprise and channel sales operations for Asia Pacific, says the company is focusing on three core strengths for the future; threat management, application performance and controlling access.
“Service providers and carriers still account for the largest part of our business in Asia Pacific, but we have a great opportunity to focus on the enterprise market now. We have defined a high performing enterprise as one that relies on network security and performance to drive business.”
Juniper told partners that the organisation will continue to work exclusively with partners through Asia Pacific, to avoid competing for tenders with its own channel.
Kinsley says the Cisco competitor aims to outperform the networking giant by offering better technology at a higher margin but admits Cisco can be a hard nut to crack.
“Talking to customers, we have found that roughly 40 percent are loyal to the Cisco brand, while 10 percent are hostile to it. That leaves a 50 percent market undecided and that is a market we want to focus on. Some competition between our partners is inevitable but Juniper does not want to get involved in this competition.”
James Wilson, Sydney-based director of the carrier partner group in the region, says the company currently has 50 registered carriers across Asia Pacific, of which 35 were active in the last quarter. In New Zealand, Juniper’s access in the carrier market comes through Gen-i.
“System integrators serve as a very powerful tool for us. Telecommunication companies are usually more used to selling speeds and feeds and we often strike a powerful link with the system integrator part of the telecommunications company, like Gen-i.”
Wilson says the carrier part of the market is still a young one, “but not quite an infant. There is a lot of room for growth here”.
“Most [telecommunications] companies have worked out that selling bandwidth is a mugs game; it’s not really a business proposition and the margins in selling bandwidth are rapidly decreasing. This is good for us, because the only way to enhance intelligence in the broadband market is to enhance intelligence in our equipment.”
“New Zealand might not be the biggest market but it is an interesting one,” says Judd. “There is a huge opportunity for resellers to work with carriers to add value and ‘stickiness’ to a sale.”
The company says there will be some major announcements in the New Zealand and Australian markets over the next few months and Juniper is expected to reveal some new, big contracts here.
Jan Birkeland travelled to Thailand as a guest of Juniper Networks.
