How Juniper sees SME market and how are you positioned here?

Today, SMEs’ concerns are actually three things - building a very decent data centre, building a very decent branch network and building a robust campus network. Juniper started with a huge focus on service providers’ market. When we started 10 years ago, all our equipments were focused on building backbones for the services providers. Now, after some time, we have been captured huge market share in the services providers’ domain. The company realises now that there is a very big market in the enterprise space including SMEs.

What is the difference between making equipment for the services providers and the enterprise?

The primary difference is the scale though features are the same. Our philosophy of having a single operating system across portfolio has helped us make sure that we adapt our products’ set to the enterprise domain. We had a ground up approach. We understood what the enterprise customers’ needs and adapted our scale of the products to that. So, today we have the products suitable for the SMEs as well. The features that SME products are actually the same compared to the products that are available for the larger enterprises and the services providers. If you look at our XRS range of products (XRS100 series or XRS 200 series) that is ideally suited for SMEs gives you routing as well as UTM capabilities comes in a single box. There is no other product in the whole market which combines routing, switching and UTM in a single box. This was made keeping SMEs in mind and the success of this product is because of our grounds up approach of actually understanding what is the SME needs. We have another series of products which is pure switching products known as EX series - so EX 2200, EX 3200 and EX 4200 are actually made keeping the SMEs in mind. This gives tremendous advantages to the SMEs who do not want to invest in the large amount of hardware. You can see the same features or same performance using this virtual chassis technology. 

In India today 25 % of our business comes from SMEs and is fastest growing business for us. Since it is most predictable part of our business, we are very bullish about our performance in SMEs. 

Which layer of SMEs are you targeting?

Although we have products for the SOHO segment, but our focus is on the top and the middle tier of SMEs. 

The perception is Juniper is only into high- end market?

Yes the perception is Juniper is for very high- end market but we are in the process of changing it that Juniper is also for the SMEs. We operate out of 11 cities through channel partners. Our account managers with the channel partners in these cities are very active. Therefore our growth rate for SME products including EX and XRS range of products is very high. We would be beefing-up our channel portfolio and our channel partner eco- system by launching newer programmes almost every quarter. Last quarter, we had a programme called ‘Save to Switch’ which gave us tremendous result. All across the country, we have got about 200 regular channel partners. 

You do not seem to have the breadth of products?

Each of the EX and XRS range has full range of products. So product wise we are absolutely Apple to Apple. If you look at the typical SMEs, instead of products they require solution, which we have.

What SMEs of today require? 

The SMEs of today know very well that IT is an enabler for their business. When they focus on building industry specific applications, the critical thing is how the applications reach to the users. That means to deliver the applications you actually have to have a productive work force and more productive partner eco-systems. So having a robust networking is extremely important to the SMEs of today. Therefore the SMEs of today are actually focusing on two things - one building a very decent data centre and second building a very decent branch network.

Now, the data centres in branch networks are formed the key portfolios for Juniper. In fact, XRS ranges of products are for the branch networks and the EX range of product are for the data centres. 

How do you engage with the channel partners?

Juniper is very solution-focused company. There are three solutions the SMEs of today need. They need data centre, good branch network and robust campus network. In these three solution sets what you require is extremely good routers, security and switching. And obviously you have to position the right product for each solution making sure that all these three solutions are propagated by the channel partners in the eleven cities that we are focusing. Therefore, every quarter, we have programme for channel partners. This quarter also, we have very good programme called ‘Safe to Switch’- focus is on two words ¬– ‘safe’ and ‘switch’. It implies that it is important to switch to Juniper in the switching domain. Because it not only gives you the best switching experience but also has great amount of security in-built. 

 In this programme, we offer very good schemes to our channel partners. These schemes range forms value based incentives to value based and project based discounts.  

This is a single programme or you keep on refreshing programmes quarter after quarter?

Quarter after quarter, we keep on refreshing programmes because at the end of the day, we believe that it is important to refresh the programme depending upon needs of the market. We have very good marketing team and channel marketing team to look at what’s required in the market and structured the plan accordingly for SMEs.

Don’t you have any large programme?

There are annual programmes obviously available in which along with our distributors we offer various promotions on the products that appeal to the SMEs. These promotions range from already based discounts to value based rebates, etc. There are master programmes also available and we run it through our three large distributers that we have in the country which include Ingram Micro, Avnet and Transition Systems.