Juniper to launch aggressive channel strategy

He said marketing is critical to the company and it needs to be more aggressive in building its brand.

"We want our partners to continue to invest in us," he said.

"Over time we want to go from passively selling and supporting Juniper products to aggressively selling them.

"We have made a conscious decision to come out of this economic downturn that much stronger and companies who have accelerated the business in times like this are getting aggressive to get to the next level."

Vitagliano said Juniper will focus on six key areas: More investment in R&D; new products and solutions and more focus on its sales force to support partners through NAMs, TAMs, ISRs.

Additionally, the vendor plans to evolve the J-Partner model to support services sales, invest in partner skills via its training and more sales and marketing tools to help partners configure solutions and marketing campaigns.

Karen O'Donnell channel and enterprise marketing manager A/NZ also said other areas Juniper wants to invest in include social media, a J-Net community blog, Twitter and facebook.

"The good news is, the business is still there. It's harder to get because it's a challenging environment and we recognise there is a lot of uncertainty because customers are not clear on what their budgets are," added Vitagliano.

"We will continue to invest in infrastructure and our programs to make it easier to do business with our partners."

Vitagliano said nearly 18 percent of all its revenues goes back into R&D.

He said partners need to wrap services around their products and added that when Juniper introduced switches to its portfolio it decided that rather than invest in a new channel for that market, it would train it own partners.

The company has 1,300 active APAC partners and 100 service partners.

It has now streamlined its products into three categories, which include, Advanced Network Infrastructure, Network Infrastructure and Advanced Security.

Vitagliano said the structure enables partners to become enabled and certified in either all or one of these product areas.