Juniper Networks heralds multi-cloud channel opportunity

SD-WAN is just a staging post on a journey towards a more complex multi-cloud world and those channel players that recognise that the world is changing are set to emerge as the leaders in the network management space.

Juniper Networks has gathered partners and customers in London this week at its Nxtwork 2018 event with the theme being around 'simplicity' and multi-cloud. The vendor is keen to establish itself as the go-to provider for any customer looking at working across a hybrid environment that connects in with the major public cloud platforms.

What it all means for the channel is that there is a need to not only get up to speed on SD-WAN but to recognise that things will go beyond that and there will be a need for greater security, management and support.

Brian Rosenberg, corporate vice president, partners and alliances at Juniper Networks, said that it wanted to take the complexity out of a multi-cloud world and it expected that strategy would yield major opportunities for channel partners.

"There is a need to drive agility in the business and the only way you can drive agility is to have a combination of things on-premise and take advantage of some of the public cloud, but there is a management overhead that you have to pay,” he added “To take advantage of that situation there have been some technologies missing, but they are now available.”

“SD-WAN is a good stepping stone to how do you get to the cloud and how do you get that access. But once you are in the cloud then things change,” he added “You can get different operational paradigms that you have to manage.”

Juniper is making it easier to work across the barriers of different platforms and providers to give a single view of the network with the belief that customers are crying out for that support.

The vendor has created some five-step programmes for channel partners to get up to speed with the changes in a networking world that is moving from being  human driven to machine and AI driven.

Russell Crampin, managing director of elite Juniper partner Axians, said that it was already having conversations with customers about the changing demands on their networks.

"We see this as an opportunity and a challenge. Customers are moving more and more towards a software defined network. That has been a hype in the market for years but that is taking more and more effect,” he added “Once you have a large software defined network it brings further challenges of how you manage that and how you get visibility and how you unlock the value of what you can do for you.”

“It is more straightforward when it is just your existing network but when you are trying to offer services to enterprises direct the need to manage their data and workload applications across ‘one seamless cloud infrastructure’ that’s when you start having to manage not only your own network but extend out into the public network and SaaS providers and that’s where you need the better visibility and control of that workload,” he added.