Juniper revamps marketing to take on Cisco in the enterprise

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 17 June 2009 01:47

IT Industry - Strategy

With a compete range of routers, switches, security and WAN optimisation products now running its Junos operating system and emboldened by new data showing the cost benefits to users of its single operating system approach, Juniper Networks is now embarking on a new aggressive marketing campaign to build market share in the enterprise and government market.

The company gathered almost 40 of its top channel partners from Australia and New Zealand for a conference at Byron Bay last week to brief them on its new approach. Promoting the benefits of a single operating system across its entire product range has long been one of the company's central marketing messages, but the strength of that message has increased considerably in the past 18 months, most significantly with the launch in early 2008 of Juniper's first switching products and, most recently, with the introduction of new low end SRX services gateway products.

Many products, one OS
Juniper now boasts a complete range of routers, switches, security and wan optimisation products to cater for the needs of small enterprise or branch offices to the core of carriers' networks and all running the same operating system. To capitalise on this technological edge it has released new research commissioned from Forrester Research designed to quantify the cost benefits of its single OS approach.

Shaun Page vice president for Juniper Australia and New Zealand told ExchangeDaily that the Forrester research went beyond earlier studies into the benefits of a single OS approach that Juniper has released previously. "We now have evidence that Junos delivers significant financial benefits to users," Page said. "The Forrester study was more comprehensive [than previous studies] in that it focussed more on the factors that drive cost. It found that it is 41 percent cheaper to operate your network when you base it on [a single operating system such as] Junos. And the cost of operating and managing an asset is often two or three times the cost of the asset itself."

Juniper sees this as a particularly powerful marketing message in the current financial situation and one which it is gearing up to deliver and exploit, saying it intends to "play offence" in the midst of the current downturn. However to do this it acknowledges that it needs to take a new approach to the market: targeting "the C suite" of executives: CIO, CFOs and company vice presidents and senior vice presidents.

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