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'If Cisco’s products can work over here, ours can work a lot better'

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DQC Bureau
New Update

Pradeep Sindhu founded Juniper Networks along with Dennis

Ferguson and Bjorn Leincres in 1996. He played a central role in architecture

design and development of the M40 router, the first Internet backbone router.

Juniper claims that these products are superior to those of its competitor

Cisco. Juniper's revenues have grown to $ 177 million since its inception in

1996. Pradeep was in India recently to open a office here aimed at expanding the

company’s global sales, services and support capabilities into India. This is

the sixth office in the Asia-Pacific region. He tells CI how Juniper is

strategizing its channel network in India.

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What is your distribution strategy? Is it direct or indirect?

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We have a sort of dual—headed strategy outside the US.

First is to make use of our three global partners, Ericsson, Alcatel and Nortel

Networks. And, second is to employ country distributors and partners. We are in

discussion with a number of companies to establish them as our partners. We won’t

like to disclose their names as yet.

 

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What kind of benefits do you provide to your local

distribution partners?

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If you have only one player in the market, that player can

actually dictate terms down to the point when the distributors are not making

money at all. But with us in the picture, the channel’s interests are

safeguarded. So this is the one of the advantages of our presence in the market.

 

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How do you plan to service your products? Are you going to

set up a separate service channel too?

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One of the things that the local partners are going to be

able to do is help us with service and support. But it really depends on the

complexity of the issue that you are talking about. If it is really a

complicated problem, then it may go back to the headquarters straight to the

developers. So it really depends on the severity of the problem.

 

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How much are you planning to invest in India?

No, we don’t talk to about the amount that we might invest.

We don’t have the target like that. The Indian market is growing very rapidly

especially by the statements by the Prime Minister (de-regulation of long

distance telephony and undersea optical fiber connectivity). Our expectation

about the growth will be more than expected. And our strategy is always to make

investment proportional to the amount of growth that is expected.

 

Don’t you think that you have entered the Indian market

pretty late, considering that Cisco and 3Com have managed to firmly entrench

themselves in the region?

Our first product came out in September 1998, which is just

under two years ago. It was very important for Juniper to establish itself in

the US market first. This is because if we did not establish ourselves there, it

would not have been possible to establish ourselves anywhere else. And so our

strategy has been to go after the highest-growth market. And objectively, there

was a cloud over the Indian market given the controls that the government had

over the place, until recently. And now that these have been lifted I think we

can move very aggressively.

 

Can you give more details about your products?

To give you the correct perspective, the Net today is built

out of many layers. There is the data layer, there is APM, sometimes frame

relay. Then there is the sonic and finally there is optical fiber. So in the

future, things are going to the two-layer network, which is optical fiber at the

bottom and data networking equipment at the top. What the optical fiber network

does is that it provides point-to-point connectivity from one city to another

with very large amounts of bandwidth.

What our equipment does is that it provides the any-to-any

connectivity between one computer and any other computer in the world. And the

equipment that we built is called routers. And those routers work typically with

optical fibers not with cable networks. And the routers that we build are the

most advanced in the world. In fact, the only competition that we have is with

Cisco.

 

How are you going to position your products in the Indian

market vis-à-vis that of Cisco?

We make the best products in this market. We have significant

advantages. Let me give three of them, they are much more high-performance, they

are much more reliable and they allow people to build a multi-service network.

So, for example, for an ISP, the key advantage of using our equipment is that

they will be able to provide services that will bring them money. So up until

recently, all they could do was offer best-effort services.

But with the equipment and especially the technology that we

have announced recently, it is possible for ISPs to put multiple services, like

virtual private network for business-to-business use, connect data centers

together and of course voice over IP. All of these can be done on the top of a

single IP base. Previously one would have to build multiple networks at great

expense to offer the same service. So, that is the key advantage that our

product possesses.

 

Which means that ISPs are your main target customers?

ISPs, then people who want to build up international data

centers, people who want to provide very high speed connectivity between

business centers — all of these are out potential customers.

 

Given India’s topography and ruggedness, do you think your

products are robust enough for this environment?

The products that we build are tested under extreme

conditions. And the hardware that we build is the most reliable in the world. If

our competitor’s products can work over here, ours can work a lot better.

 

Will you partner companies who are laying down fiber optic

networks to provide custom-made products for them?

We are not only working with ISPs but also with people who

are laying fiber, people who need to provide and control tremendous amount of

bandwidth. These are the people in fact who will benefit most from the equipment

that we provide. Our routers can help people to build the most robust networks

in the world. So people who have a lot of bandwidth especially are looking at

Juniper’s products.

Vinita Suvarna in Mumbai

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