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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a significant role in the way Juniper Networks appeals to its channel partners.
In an interview, Dean Cunningham, Juniper senior director of partner sales for Asia Pacific Japan, said that AI will play a significant role in making partners’ operations easier.
The networking vendor is focused on bolstering partner capabilities, especially for managed service providers through comprehensive channel programs, training and access to advanced technologies like its AI-Native Networking Platform.
“When it comes to AI initially, businesses had a certain vision of what AI could do, but as they discover new use cases, they realise its broader potential,” said Cunningham. “This constant discovery is reshaping how businesses operate.”
In March this year Juniper launched its latest iteration of the Juniper Partner Advantage (JPA) Program.
This update introduced new elements designed to help partners leverage AI for IT operations (AIOps) to offer managed networking services with enhanced reliability, agility and reach.
The updated JPA Program focuses on integrating AIOps capabilities, allowing partners to provide advanced managed networking services. This integration supports increased reliability and agility, unlocking new revenue opportunities for partners.
Each year the vendor evolves the JPA program to elevate partners’ role and optimise their profitability, with managed service providers (MSPs) a “big focus” for the vendor.
“I think from a Juniper perspective, we’re probably a little behind the US and EMEA in terms of adoption, but we’ve made some updates to our MSP program,” he said. “What we’ve found, through various conversations, is that many new and existing partners have MSP businesses, but they haven’t necessarily been doing them with Juniper.”
What’s changed for the vendor is that is had made it easier by shifting from just a program to more of a use case to allow partners to see how they can slot Juniper into their existing operations, said Cunningham.
“Obviously, for every MSP, the challenge is their own integration work,” he said. “Where it’s gotten easier is the APIs that came with the AI-Native Network Platform are easy to integrate with and several [Australia and New Zealand] partners have gotten ahead by using those APIs in their managed service platforms, making the process much smoother.”
For Cunningham, it’s all about simplification and how the vendor can remove what might seem like “hurdles” and allow partners to pick up and integrate products into their day-to-day operations.
Another one of its programs Juniper is focusing on is its Champions Program.
“The Champions Program is about allowing our partners to validate the skills they have, and then we help them promote those skills to customers by saying, ‘look, this partner has met these criteria,” he said.
“We’ve also got a Partner Assurance Program, where it’s not just Juniper saying that a partner has the skills, but we’re actually engaging with third parties to validate those skills on behalf of the partners.”
Cunningham noted that a lot of feedback from owners and senior executives at its partner companies has been that they’re all for educating their people, but every time they pull a service engineer out of the field, it costs them money, since those engineers are revenue-generating assets.
“If you take them out of the field for two weeks, that costs them a certain amount, so they want to know the benefit is worth it,” he said.
In response, Juniper has developed the Partner Acceleration Program, with the idea that if partners already have certain certifications, “like university prerequisites”, then they’ve got the skills.
“We simplified the process by taking what used to be a multi-week training program and narrowing it down to a couple of hours of video followed by a single exam, instead of taking people out of the field for five weeks,” he said.
As a result, partners remain keen to learn and Juniper is learning from them about what they’re seeing in the field on a day-to-day basis, noted Cunningham.
All these steps are necessary to help channel partners to meet the economic headwinds, as businesses become selective in their digital transformation journey, said Cunningham.
“In the face of economic challenges, organisations are focusing on improving efficiency without making drastic changes,” he said. “AI, especially when implemented as part of a unified platform, is helping companies achieve these efficiencies.”
According to Cunningham, the IDC report IDC FutureScape: Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the IT Industry and the Way Businesses Operate suggests that by 2025, 40 per cent of IT spending will be related to AI.
The digital transformation underway shows no signs of slowing down, noted Cunningham.
“It’s not something where companies can simply declare they’re done, instead, they’re continuously evolving as they grasp new AI capabilities,” he added.