Juniper Shows Off Its Channel Stripes

On Thursday, a host of Juniper Networks executives used the company's annual financial analyst day to highlight its mission for the coming year and underline its overall commitment to, and reliance on, the channel.

The Juniper brass addressed attendees at a hotel near San Francisco. They didn't announce any new products or initiatives, instead delivering a message of confidence that the company is making headway in its efforts to become a more recognized network vendor but acknowledging that much work still needs to be done.

A case in point: Juniper recently commissioned Infonetics Research to do a study that produced a good news/bad news scenario. The good news is, the survey of service providers showed that when a potential partner knows who Juniper is, they're 88 percent likely to put the company on its "short list" of vendors it will work with, the same conversion rate as Juniper rival Cisco Systems. The bad news is, the survey's respondents were more than three times more likely to recognize the Cisco name.

Jim Dolce, Juniper's EVP of worldwide field operations, says this is a question of branding. "One of our key initiatives in 2005 is to build our brand, especially as we cross over to the enterprise market," he says. "We need to make sure more people know who we are, because once they do, they'll put us on their short list."

Dolce and the other speakers stressed over and over how important the channel is to getting the word out about Juniper. "100 percent of our fulfillment in the enterprise is done through the channel," he says. "We don't want to undermine the channel by giving the impression that they can put together a deal so we can come in and take it direct."

This philosophy carries over to services as well. "We don't sell as many professional services on the enterprise side because that's where resellers make a lot of their margins, but we do sell services to larger carrier services providers," Dolce says.

Juniper vice president of worldwide channels Tushar Kothari says his primary goal since coming over from Cisco last summer has been to build the company brand around its channel partners. "Jim Dolce told me when I arrived that I had carte blanche to build a world-class channel company," he says. "If we truly leverage the channel, customers will appreciate the value the channel provides, which will make it easier to justify increasing profit margins."

He says Juniper's commitment to partners extends across the company's back-office systems, internal IT investments and overall product line, something backed up by CEO Scott Kriens in his opening remarks. "We're building the partner model this way because it's the best way to get the most out of the innovations we're creating," he says. "People keep searching for 'the' networking company or 'the' product company, but there isn't going to be only one."