Juniper changes 'unpredictable' channel programme

Networking vendor rings the changes

Juniper Networks has announced a refresh to its channel partner programme, with changes made to its marketing development fund (MDF), rebates and training programme.

In a blog post, Juniper's worldwide vice president of field marketing, Matt Hurley (pictured), said the company has listened to its partners and admitted they have said Juniper's partner programme can be "a bit unpredictable", and so the vendor is making changes that it hopes will make the programme more attractive.

The networking vendor is extending its market development funds (MDF) window from three to six months, and is revamping the Juniper Marketing Concierge.

Juniper is also going to give its rebate programme, which has a quarterly target, a half-year catch-up period which will give partners a six-month target but measure it quarterly, and a bonus will be available if the partner makes the target in each quarter in succession, or if the partner misses the first target but makes the second one.

Hurley said: "We're going to focus our energy on high-growth areas such as cloud offerings and SDN, with an emphasis on services along with products, and provide you with the resources that will help you accelerate revenue growth in these areas: performance rebates, MDF, vertical market campaigns, and demand generation and sales tools to drive your business."

The firm is also investing in five new one-and-a-half-day courses for its marketing academy and adding two new marketing training modules to its marketing education curriculum.

Juniper recently changed its chief executive, with Rami Rahim taking over in November, but Darryl Brick, Juniper's regional partner director of UK and Southern Europe, has stressed there has been no "major change to the channel strategy" with the new boss.

"This is just purely a channel enhancement to make our channel more profitable and grow the business," he said. "Despite some of the changes we have had to make last year to align to growth markets, we have made our alignments, cost wise, technology wise, leadership wise, and those are a lot of changes to make in one year, but we have made them and the ship is still sailing and that's a damn good thing."

Brick said that discount levels have increased for Elite and Select partners.

Under the updated partner programme, Juniper's Select and Elite partners will also be available for the Base Product Incentive Rebate and a new Commercial Accelerator Rebate.

For its distributors, Juniper is offering a quarterly rebate via its Distributor Performance Incentive programme.

Juniper is also trying to simplify its programme by reducing the number of product authorisation requirements from seven to three – routing, switching and security.