Juniper heats up battle in Thai climate

If you were asked to discuss the lives and achievements of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, you could probably talk about the 1969 moon landing with some confidence. However if you were asked to give a short synopsis of Michael Collins you might find yourself struggling for substance. In case you were wondering, Collins orbited the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin performed the first manned landing on the lunar surface.

The relevance of this point centres on the current networking landscape. Cisco Systems is very much the Armstrong and Aldrin of the sector. It is the name every vendor, distributor, reseller and end-user knows when it comes to networking needs. Cisco has a dominance of the networking market, which depending on what analyst you follow, can be accredited at the 70 to 80 percent mark. The remaining market is made up of others Collins, who have spent years watching on as Cisco marked its flag in the networking surface.

However, Cisco does have rivals and these rivals are determined to wrestle over market share. One such contender comes in the form of US-based vendor Juniper Networks.

The Juniper express has been gaining momentum in recent times and the vendor gathered its partners in Phuket, Thailand for its APAC J-Partner Summit 2007. CRN was in attendance to assess the vendor’s progress.

Annual progress
“We knew last year that we had a challenging year ahead, but we have made tremendous progress,” said Adam Judd, vice president for Asia Pacific at Juniper. “We have seen strong growth across APAC, with 40 percent growth in Australia. It is all about expanding market share in the competitive APAC region.”

Judd said he can assure partners they will not see Juniper sell direct in APAC as the firm wants to work with partners.

“70 percent of our business is still going through carriers. Also in the past year 80 percent of our carriers are using 80 percent of our portfolio,” he said.

“The broadband market is moving towards Ethernet and high-speed access. All carriers have realised that selling bandwidth has become a commodity, with the margins decreasing. They are asking how to make their connection with customers stickier and make more revenue.”

Judd said Juniper has put more intelligence in its equipment and expanded its portfolio on the carrier side with most carriers embracing the security offerings.

“The managed services market will be huge in APAC, as businesses want to outsource with IT becoming more complex. The service provider has to look towards managed services as this is not just a trend. We believe a great channel to market is through managed services.”

Judd said managed services will enable partners to have more stickiness to the customer and boost revenue figures.

“We have targeted 400 of the top enterprise businesses in APAC and are driving the Juniper brand into these organisations. These customers are critical for us as they are the reference for others to follow,” he said.

“We are not going after the whole market. The three things you are going to hear from Juniper over and over again are threat management, application performance and controlling access.”

Judd said the market opportunity in threat management is huge and partners have been successful providing firewalls.

“We have also been having success winning some of the largest enterprise business in APAC.

We believe we have the right products and a proposition which allows partners to add value to their business.”

Judd said the Australian market is interesting as there is a wide gulf between the larger channel firms and the niche players.

Carrier strength
“A/NZ has been very successful and the power of the carrier is very strong. Our carrier customers have been a success with players such as Telstra and Optus. Resellers are important to a lot of carriers and that resell business will become more and more common,” he said.

Judd said Juniper will look at acquisitions which enhance the vendor’s value; however it will look towards partnerships before making an acquisition.

“We know security and routing are coming together and will merge. Our partners come from both networking

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