Ken Lord - Country Manager, Juniper Networks New Zealand, addressing the Kiwi channel at the 2015 Reseller News ICT Industry Awards
Networking and cyber security vendor Juniper Networks is sharpening its value proposition within the New Zealand channel, as well as focusing on transparency and communication with partners.
NZ country manager Ken Lord shared the vendor’s view of the current market, and how channel partners can expect to achieve success.
Lord sees a light at the end of the tunnel for customer appetite for investment following a challenging period of rising inflation, global unrest, and tight labour market conditions.
“We are starting to see a comeback in the market in terms of adoption and implementation of technology, especially with organisations embracing flexible working and investing in campus networks, especially in the last 12 months or so”, Lord said.
While market uncertainty will continue to fluctuate, this presents an opportunity for businesses.
“The capabilities of automation now available can help divert resources into more valuable work streams like network optimisation and security. It also brings a whole extra layer of proactive network management which drives improved customer experience," he said.
According to Lord, the most in-demand technology solutions and services surround networking hardware, driven largely by supply chain issues gripping the industry. Coupled with the tight labour market, enterprises are left with the option of attempting to optimise existing resources.
“Cost containment is a big driver in this space, so automation is playing a big part in addressing the issue of low investment in new digital infrastructure,” he said.
“It solves a raft of issues because it means the skilled labour market can take its attention away from operational tasks and instead focus them on more value-add activities. Services like cloud orchestration achieve this, so we’ve seen growing demand in this space.”
In the coming months, Lord sees opportunities for channel partners to articulate their value propositions to customers and ultimately drive business growth.
He also noted the importance of partnering with the right vendors to solutions that “jointly solve end user challenges”.
“For us, it’s important to stay tightly engaged with the channel to make sure that our value propositions are understood by them and the wider industry”, he continued.
Juniper Networks is “working hard to help ensure our channel partners have a good grasp of the solution sets that can bring real value to their end customers.”
The vendor is looking to continue strong investment in the service provider space, including bigger focus on enterprise and commercial.
“We've seen strength in the enterprise side here, particularly around campus switching and Mist wireless LAN”.
For Lord, the channel is critical to success in this area, saying “we have two dedicated resources in NZ focused on developing that enterprise and commercial business with the channel and they’ve got a busy year ahead of them”.
Juniper Networks acquired Cisco-founded start-up Mist in 2019, followed in 2021 by the acquisition of Apstra.
For Lord, these acquisitions “have really strengthened the offerings we bring to the enterprise and commercial segments, delivering real value into that space”.
Lord also shared the hallmarks of a successful channel partner in the Juniper Networks ecosystem, saying “it’s really important to us that a reseller understands their role and the value they can bring to a customer relationship as well, of course, as having a sound understanding of Juniper’s value proposition.”
“Typically, those are the resellers that we see succeed long term in this space.”
According to Lord, this value placed on clear communication is also Juniper Network’s point of differentiation within the channel.
“Our preference is not to have lots of different resellers chasing the same piece of business”, he continued.
“For us, it’s important that our resellers have line of sight to winning profitable deals and in doing that successfully, we pride ourselves on being transparent and keeping an open line of communication with them”.
