Juniper goes for specialisation focus in channel overhaul

Existing channel programme had 'too many barriers in place'

Juniper has revealed why it is overhauling its global partner programme, ahead of its rollout in a few weeks.

On January 1, 2018, the networking vendor will introduce seven specialisations by which its Elite and Select partners will be known: Security, Datacentre, Service Specialist, Software Development Partner, Cloud Services Partner, Cloud Integrator and Cloud First Select.

Juniper's corporate VP of partners and alliances, Brian Rosenberg, said its existing channel programme had "too many barriers in place" to support the vendor's investment in areas like cloud, security and the datacenter, as well as its efforts to develop its enterprise business.

"We know we need to grow in security. We know we need to grow in cloud. We know need to grow in datacenter. We need to take better advantage of the assets we have in AWS and Azure," he said.

"The existing program had too many barriers to do that, too many certifications partners had to have, things that might not be so applicable."

In addition, he said a lot of Juniper's partner incentives have been too general and "weren't targeted at the right technologies".

"I want to make sure we're investing in areas where we're not already investing our own OPEX via a high touch sales force," he said.

As a result, Rosenberg said Juniper was lowering the barriers to entry for partners. For example, previous Elite partners need to have a "quite expensive" services specialisation certification, which will be removed in the new programme.

He says Juniper has also reduced the number of people that have to be certified across Juniper technologies - there will be fewer people required to undertake certification in their chosen specialisations.

"We're moving away from generalist, to very specific skills sets," he said.

Partners will have until the end of March 2018 to complete certification in their chosen categories.

Rosenberg also said Juniper is looking to sign up new partners, particularly those in managed security, and can help organisations securely move workloads into multi-cloud environments.