Juniper CEO: 'Partners Are Betting On A Winner'

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Since taking over as Juniper's CEO last September, Kevin Johnson has vowed to keep the networking company's key focus on partners and the channel.

Taking the stage this week at his first Juniper J-Partner Summit in Las Vegas, Johnson told the more than 200 partners in attendance that Juniper relies on them for much of its success and is working diligently to make them more profitable while making Juniper an easier company to work with.

In just a short time on the stage, Johnson, who joined Juniper after more than 15 years with Microsoft, outlined Juniper's renewed focus on marketing to help partners win deals, Juniper's story around lower total cost of ownership and value, and the rounding out of Juniper's portfolio, which makes the company a "pure play in high-performance networking that embraces partnerships."

Following his address, Channelweb.com sat down with Johnson to discuss Juniper's past, present and future with partners; its product portfolio; the competitive landscape; and how Juniper plans to add value and keep partners profitable. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Can you give us an idea when you hit the two-year mark at Juniper what's going to be different?

Fundamentally, Juniper is a growth company. Look at the growth we've seen just over the last year: growth in revenue, growth in profitability, growth in head count, growth in partners, growth in expanding product portfolio. I think the story over the next couple of years is how we manage that growth. Are we thoughtful about the investments we're making? Are we delivering product that's enabling customer value? Is that value translating to growth in market share? Does that growth in market share lead to growth and opportunity for our partners? And if we do that well, if we create that formula, I think we're laying the foundation for the next 10 years of growth.

How will the partners grow with Juniper over the next few years? What segments, what markets? Is it a vertical play? Is it a sector play? Is it in the enterprise? Is it a midmarket play?

Start with the enterprise. Take enterprise and public sector: Today our two largest verticals within enterprise really are public sector and financial services. But there's a set of customers that have the characteristics that need high-performance networks. Those are the customers that I think create growth opportunities for our partners. Oftentimes those customers are characterized by having one or more attributes. No. 1, their reputation depends on the availability and performance of their network. Their revenue depends on the performance and availability of the network. Or their mission depends on the availability and performance of the network. If one or more of those three things is true, those customers have a need for high-performance networks. Today you find those types of customers in every industry vertical. Yet, today a significant portion of demand is coming from financial services and public sector, but I expect that to continue to grow.

What are the holes in the partner portfolio? Are there any kinds of partners you want? Do you have enough? Is there something you'd like to have that you don't have with partners?

For the most part, my view is we've got some great partners, yet we want to continue to help our partners reach scale. That means having partners with a broader range of services that they take to the market, larger numbers of employees that have the skills around JUNOS [Juniper's network operating system] and the Juniper technologies. Part of that is the fact that we are just reaching scale in the enterprise. Our enterprise business last year was just over $1 billion in revenue and it's growing at double-digit rates. The fact is, we as a company have an opportunity to achieve more scale in the enterprise and we have to do that with our partners. Do we need more partners? We need partners with more critical mass. We can do that with our existing base of partners. The partners that are helping us be successful today, we're going to continue to invest in those partners and help them grow their business. I think there are opportunities for us to continue to strengthen our partnerships at the high end. Look at the strategic alliance we have with IBM. With technology companies that also have a thorough leadership agenda, we're going to reach out and embrace our partnerships and I think that will help complete or continue to enhance the portfolio of solutions we have, whether it's in the data center or in the core network infrastructure.

How do you plan to get the Juniper name in front of the customer? What are you and your partners doing to get in front of customers?

There's an element of awareness. We've measured unaided awareness in the enterprise and our unaided awareness is very low. You ask customers to say what are the providers of high-performance networking and it's a fact that we have an opportunity to increase that. Below that then is the demand generation. We have an opportunity to do a better job telling our story when it comes to the value proposition. And out of that demand generation we have an opportunity to do a better job routing these leads and opportunities to our field and to our partners.

Next: Johnson Discusses Services And Profitability

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