Data Networking Category Profile

At VARBusiness, we've been trumpeting services for some time now as a crucial emerging business focus for solution providers. Regardless of whether the services portion of your revenue is 5 percent or 100 percent, it's a component that customers are clamoring for, and one that every VAR must consider adding to their portfolio.

But it's not just solution providers that need to start thinking this way; it's vendors too.

And the importance of those services--or, more accurately, the inability of some vendors to acknowledge their importance--was made quite evident this year in the Data Networking category of the 2006 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) survey. In several other categories, too, vendors with otherwise respectable scores saw their overall rankings knocked down a notch or two because of their failure to give partners the service and support they need, and because of their less-than-stellar partnership strategies.

Case in point: Juniper Networks. The vendor has been a channel darling for some time now. We've tracked the development of the company's channel program in great detail and chronicled its rise, trumpeting Juniper's technology and lauding it for how much it "gets" the channel.

But despite a strong showing in 2005, when Juniper ranked behind Hewlett-Packard but ahead of Cisco Systems, Juniper finished dead last in this field of eight, behind Cisco, HP (ProCurve), Enterasys, Alcatel, Linksys, Netgear and the perpetually floundering 3Com.

In Support, Juniper finished second-to-last, with a score of 56. Its steepest drop from last year was in marketing support, where the vendor's score plummeted from 66 in 2005 to 49 this year.

"They really don't make themselves readily available," says Heather Solomon, a sales rep at Central Microsystems in LaSalle, Quebec. "That's especially true in presales. When I'm trying to get product specs or find out which product would suit a specific customer, it's really hard to find the right person to talk to."

But Juniper took an even more dramatic hit from the channel in Partnership. Last year, the company benefited from a wait-and-see attitude, as its partner program had just been launched when the ARC survey was in the field. At the time, VARs liked what they were hearing, and the scores reflected that optimism, hovering in the respectable mid-to-high 60s.

This year, Juniper topped out in Partnership at a mediocre 57 for ease of doing business. Its overall score in this area was a 53, which put it 4 points behind second-to-last finisher 3Com and 22 points behind Cisco. To boot, Juniper earned a lowly 48 in services engagement opportunity.

Juniper fared just as badly in Loyalty, where it lagged 21 points behind Cisco.

Even in Product Innovation, long regarded as one of Juniper's strengths, the ARC scores didn't corroborate that point of view. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based vendor earned a 66 in this area, putting it in last place.

Cisco earned an 81 in that area. Its Linksys arm, though only in the middle of the pack, received a 73, but some solution providers are noticing an uptick in product quality.

"The Linksys products have improved dramatically," Solomon says. "These SOHO and midmarket offerings now integrate the quality, reliability and features of their enterprise counterparts from Cisco."

As for Juniper, perhaps company executives, guided by channel chief Frank Vitagliano and Scott Kriens, can right the ship. But unless the vendor and its management team can do a better job of engaging its partners and proving again that it truly "gets" the channel, the channel won't be getting them.