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Juniper Networks continues NaaS channel push

Networking supplier has been promoting its as-a-service offering for more than a year, but combined with greater AI tools, 2024 should be a time of growth across the firm’s channel

Simon Quicke
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Published: 21 Nov 2023 16:00

Juniper Networks is looking for significant growth from the managed service partner (MSP) community as it continues to push its network-as-a-service (NaaS) option.

The vendor has been promoting its NaaS offering for a while, and has already seen some success with partners, but it’s looking for a doubling of activity with MSPs next year.

The introduction of increased artificial intelligence (AI) functionality should stir greater interest from customers, and the vendor’s recent partner event concentrated on discussing the benefits of the technology.

Dale Smith, channel director for EMEA at Juniper Networks, is keen to push forward into 2024 with a message around how its technology is using AI to arm MSPs with more insights.

“When it comes to our partners, they get the story and they get the opportunity with Juniper,” he said.

Smith said the focus of the bulk of this year had been around educating and promoting AI networking capabilities to partners, and confirmed that would continue.

“We have been very busy over the past six to 12 months in our partner programmes, and in our go-to-markets with our partners around how they can really increase their profitability around these products,” he said. “It is really around providing that network as a service. When you look at our tech and what NaaS can provide, it’s ingesting all of this data, which is humongous amounts [and providing] self remediating on most basic queries on the network.”

Growth targets 

Smith is working with ambitious growth targets, but said the firm felt it had the right partners to get the intended results.

“There’s a lot of headroom for us to grow into,” he said. “If you get the investments, partnerships, marketing and go to markets, then all of the stars align and we know we can take that growth,” he said. “We do spend a lot more time talking to our partners about how we’re going to grow even further, how we’re going to increase partner profitability and increase our collaboration.”

Juniper is also using its partner programmes to encourage and reward more involvement with NaaS as it supports those existing channel players that are increasing their MSP exposure.

“We’re pivoting our partner programme to complement the go to markets around as a service so that we’re rewarding partners more for selling as a service,” he said. “We’re increasing the sort of profitability on the rebates to recognise their endeavours on bringing opportunities to us, net new logos, and more around that.”

Juniper will be looking to work with existing partners to grow its managed service sales and make sure it can increase the business, as well as opening the door to those that could join the ranks and add value.

“There will be an element of [adding some fresh partners], but it’s the existing Juniper partners that are evolving their practice – and that’s the important thing here, that they are adding this to their existing Juniper practice as another layer of go to market,” said Smith.

“It’s entirely complimentary, because they get the technology and how to position it. They get how to operate and manage it, because they’ve been doing so for such a long time.”

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