To ensure its growing partner community has the necessary skills-sets to take its solutions to market, high-performance networking vendor, Juniper Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: JNPR) has enhanced its J-Partner Program by adding three new specialization areas to the program.
The enhancements to its partner program came into effect last month, John Dathan, enterprise sales director for Juniper Networks in Canada said. As the company continues to expand its product portfolio, Dathan says the J-Partner Program needed to be re-evaluated and enhanced to better suit the needs of the company’s channel partners.
“Our channel program’s about mutually growing our and our partners’ revenue and profitability,” he said. “Our business is dependant on our channels and our program is about skills and partner value, rather than about the quantity and size of them.”
There are three new specialization areas which all of its products are now classified under. Within the J-Partner Program, these product areas include, security, network infrastructure and advanced network infrastructure. In addition to this, Juniper has also introduced three new programs within its J-Partner Program made up of the managed service provider program, a consultants program and a service provider infrastructure program.
Dathan says these categories and programs were created to allow partners to take a more granular approach with their customers by being able to specialize in specific areas. This, he says, will help partners to increase their revenue and profits with the company. Partners can be classified under just one category, or in all three; there’s no limit to how many categories a partner can be in, provided they meet the appropriate criteria, he adds.
Under the new managed service provider program, partners can develop their own managed service offerings based on Juniper’s products. Dathan also says this particular program is by invite-only. With the consultants program, consultants receive information, and invites to events and webinars. Lastly, as the name suggests, the service provider infrastructure program is designed for Juniper service providers and gives these partners access to relevant materials, sales tools and marketing support from the company.
“A mutual investment from partners is required,” Dathan said. “We need (partners’) time and attention, and in return, we provide training, access to information, channel management and support services to them.”Currently, Dathan says Juniper has 12,000 registered partners worldwide, with about 4,100 of them coming from North America. The company, he adds, is still on the lookout for more partners, but Dathan makes it clear that the company “doesn’t want to be over subscribed where (it has) too many partners. We’re looking to grow in places such as tier-two cities, so that may be in the Northern and Southern parts of Ontario, for example,” he added.
