Juniper's new EMEA boss keen to woo enterprise partners

Networking and security vendor Juniper Networks has appointed a new EMEA channel boss who is looking to land big fish datacentre players

US networking giant Juniper Networks has appointed Kristian Kerr as its new head of channel, alliances and commercial for EMEA.

Making the move from troubled storage vendor Brocade Communications (which this week announced a mass layoff following merger complications with Broadcom), Kerr outlined his ambitious channel expansion strategy to lure big fish enterprise targets.

"The message is that we're not going to go out and recruit mass market a whole load of new partners. It's going to be very targeted to specific geographies and it's going to be focused on tech growth areas for us on datacentres and security," Kerr said.

"We will now be going through a process where we will identify who the main datacentre and security partners in any given territory are, and then, if we're not engaged with them already, through the local partner teams and working closer with distribution, we'll start targeting them and bringing them on board.

"It's not a disruptive play, it's complementary."

Its latest news was the announcement of Nuvias as its pan-EMEA distributor of its advanced networking, datacentre and security offerings last week.

Kerr said that Juniper intends to invest in expanding the company's capacity to adapt to new technologies.

"IoT is a big topic for us. I was in the US last week and I was told by IDC that they predict there will be one million new devices going online every hour by 2020.

"That's staggering. I boil that down and think 'what are the opportunities for Juniper and our partners?'

"We've got to make sure that security is embedded across the whole environment of the network, and that's both hardware and software.

"As you can imagine, with the amount of analytics that all those devices are going to throw up, even beyond 2020, these networks will have to be highly automated and flexible."

Kerr added that Juniper will release a channel survey later this week to ascertain which technologies partners are investing in.

"We have a very strong commitment to address some of the new and emerging technologies," Kerr said.

"Especially in the security space, if you speak to any CIO, or leader in an enterprise or even mid-tier organisation, that is the number one priority.

"I looked at some data last week [which said] 64 per cent of companies have experienced web-based attacks, 51 per cent in the last year [have experienced] denial service attacks… Clearly this impacts their business and partners are looking to Juniper to secure their infrastructure.

"I see the opportunity for partners through security, the data that will be generated with that, processing it and the analytics."

Founded in 1996, Juniper has made four acquisitions in the last 18 months, with security software vendor Cyphort being the most recent, in August.

Juniper's half-year results ending 30 June 2017 saw a nine per cent rise in total revenues year on year from $2.32bn (€1.94bn) to $2.53bn (€2.12bn). The company has also secured $228.89m in venture capital funding in the last five years.