Juniper on Tuesday debuted new training and marketing resources designed to strengthen two areas where Juniper partners have insisted the networking vendor needs to bulk up.
The first, Juniper Networks Learning Academy, is an online learning center that offers partners testing, podcasts, videos, sales curriculum, virtual demonstrations and other content designed to supplement more formal training on Juniper products and services. It'll be available to partners for no charge starting in July.
The second, Juniper Networks Global Marketing Resource Center, offers co-branded and customizable marketing resources to partners. It will be available in the second half of 2010.
Both new programs, which Juniper announced Tuesday morning on the second day of its J-Partner Summit in Phoenix, come from nearly a year of planning, according to Frank Vitagliano, senior vice president of partners, Americas, at Juniper.
"The partner community has consistently told us, you need to do a better job of providing us with air cover," Vitagliano said in an interview with CRN. "You need to help us tell our customers how Juniper is so this isn't a scenario where we're walking in having to convince this is best in class. We've really taken that to heart."
The other thing partners have been asking for, Vitaligano said, is customized training, which the Learning Academy intends to provide.
"The only thing the partners want to hear is: if I'm going to bet on you, why? Why am I not going to get burned by doing that?" Vitagliano said. "We have to be able to articulate that. You have to have a framework around that. And we do have that."
