Juniper Networks Chases Enterprise Sales with Changes to Partner Organization

Juniper Networks is heralding “big changes” to its partner organization as it chases enterprise market share.

“We want to accelerate penetration into the enterprise market; it’s no secret, everyone knows that,” said Sander Groot, head of EMEA & CALA channels at Juniper Networks.

The most significant change is to the rebates available to partners in Juniper’s Partner Advantage Program.

Juniper Networks’ Sander Groot

“This year we put our money where our mouth is. We have invested more money than ever before on the rebate potential for our partners. The key to unlocking their rebate earnings is via deal registration,” said Groot. “Partners can start earning as of dollar one when they register. It is broad; it is all technologies, and its regardless of which end-user segments they sell into.”

Partners can also earn rewards on top of that via additional targets. They get these when they achieve a certain percentage of their total sales via deal registration.

“It is a reward mechanism to go to deal registration,” said Groot.

Juniper also now will compensate managed partner account managers (PAMs) for partners’ deal-registered sales for the first time.

“Previously they were compensated on the business plans for managed partners,” said Groot. “Now, we want that to go via deal registration, so they carry a deal-reg target. We’ve got an internal and an external mechanism to make deal registration work. We want partners, at the earliest stage possible, to bring opportunities to us. We can immediately fill our pipelines for our sales teams and for the partner to start working on these opportunities.”

Taking Enterprise Market Share

At a high level, Groot says Juniper is taking enterprise market share — but couldn’t share specifics. As part of the enterprise push, however, the exec has increased the number of Juniper managed partners. Since last summer, Juniper has grown its numbers from 160 to 250 partners. This figure comprises partners in both EMEA and CALA (Caribbean and Latin America).

Elsewhere, Juniper has continued to build out its Enterprise+ program, which it launched 10 months ago.

“We have seen very good success over 2020,” said Groot. “Enterprise+ partners worldwide have grown between 20% and 25%. The number of my partners in the program has increased from 32 to 50. This includes six partners from Latin America, for the first time.”

The exec said the firm was on the hunt for pure enterprise partners. Groot specified they needed to have a Wi-Fi practice, and a campus and branch installed base. He is adamant that any partner must lead with Mist, Juniper’s AI solution for cloud-managed wireless networks.

“If partners don’t want to do that, then we don’t play,” he said.

Accelerate+ for Distribution

Despite the enterprise focus, the service provider market still contributes the most business to Juniper by some margin. However, Groot has reallocated specific PAMs to take care of its large service provider-focused partners. This, he said, frees up capacity to onboard more enterprise partners under the control of more PAMs.

Groot also flagged the launch of a new program, Accelerate+, which is targeted at distribution. The program enables distributors to use the same content and the campaign information used in Enterprise+.

“We want distributors to go and educate and enable partners; also, to scan the market for new partnerships, because we see interest from all sorts of partners out there.”