Exclusive Interview: Harshavardhan Kathaley, Director Partner Sales, Juniper Networks

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Harshavardhan Kathaley, Director- Partner Sales, India and SAARC, Juniper Networks shed the lights on the Juniper Network’s 2021 strategy and how they are transforming networking for the cloud era and how Juniper Partner Advantage (JPA) Program enables business transformation in the Indian ecosystem.

Harshavardhan Kathaley, Director- Partner Sales, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks

What are the recent developments in Juniper Networks? How did your customers during the pandemic?

We responded to the pandemic situation very responsibly. We along with our partners had opened support to all our critical customers in hospitals, pharma and governments which we were involved in fighting the pandemic. Juniper supported all customers despite the level and validity of the contract. Juniper along with Mist (Juniper’s Wi-Fi offering) came out with proximity tracing solutions deployed some of them in India as well and otherwise globally.

What are the Juniper Networks GTM strategies for the Indian market?

We are celebrating our 25th year in the company. We lead a lot of innovation in networking with many industries by acquisition wherever it was required by completing the portfolio.  We serve every segment of the industry.  BFSI is a definitely big focus area for us than from the infrastructure side. Government and Digital India project both for central government as well as for state government, that continues to be a focus area and we work with the government very closely on that.

From the enterprise side, we have a strong hand in Web 2.0 and e-commerce companies. All the telco operators have a heavy deployment of Juniper gear into their infrastructure and that will continue to happen.  We are seeing that the 5G auctions have also started and we are very confident that the telecom sector will start increasing growth around that.

What are the different partner programs you are planning in 2021?

Juniper Networks has announced a new global Juniper Partner Advantage (JPA) Program, effective from January 1, 2021. The Program introduces new opportunities for Partners to capture business through Juniper’s market-leading AI-Driven Enterprise strategy. Juniper is also offering sizeable rewards to Juniper Partners who boldly invest, which will match the significant investments Juniper is making in the Juniper Partner Program and in Virtual Sales.

The 2021 partner program is focused on enhanced rewards to grow the partner-led business. The three pillars of this program.

1. How do we accelerate innovations with our partners and for our partners
2. How do we grow partner-led businesses profitability
3. How do we deliver business simplicity

Juniper has spent over $100 million-plus on the partner programs this year. We have plus programs, end-customer plus program, service provider plus program and acceleration plus program, depending on the focus of the partner. Each program provides the necessary tools as well as the necessary rewards depending on the business model of partners.  In terms of simplicity, we have come out with a new 360 dashboard that provides the partners with a single-pane view of all the parameters of their partnership with us in terms of the certifications, targets, rebates, the new upcoming activities.

Any expansion plans in terms of your partner ecosystem or geographical presence?

We cover all the SAARC regions except Pakistan from India. We cover Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and we have our partners in this region as well.  We have a good footprint in all the geographies and we have good know-how and well connectivity with the rest of the partner.  The second part of the expansion is helping partner grow their capability with the new offering with Juniper. We are ensuring to work closely with our partners not only to help them with their regular specializations but also help them in enablement to take them really with all the new acquisitions with Juniper Networks.