Juniper revamps marketing to take on Cisco in the enterprise

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 17 June 2009 02:47

IT Industry - Strategy

Marketing to 'the C-suite'
Karen O'Donnell, ANZ channel and enterprise marketing manager, told delegates at the partner summit "The CFO is running the business these days so we need to build mind share with more touches in that C suite ... We did some research earlier this year and we asked 'when it come to high performance networking who is involved in deciding on products and vendors in your organisation?' Seventy three percent of respondents told us that the C suite are now actively invoiced in that decision-making process."

She added: "And almost half of the C-suite are now saying to us they are more accountable for and have more influence over network purchasing decisions, so that is a real shift in how decisions are made by our customers."

This escalation of responsibility for IT purchasing decisions is, in part at least, a result of the global financial situation. Frank Vitagliano, Juniper's senior VP of worldwide channels, told ExchangeDaily "Customers are not increasing their IT budgets and a big chunk of the dollars, 70-80 percent, are being spent just keeping the lights on. So only a small part of the money is being used to innovate, to do something different. And our view is that if we are not able to up-level our message and articulate the [total cost of ownership] story effectively we are not going to be able to get the attention we need."

He added: "You don't always get a purchasing agent who will listen to that TCO story and buy that; he is often focused on the transaction. So we have to talk about what is involved beyond capex; and opex is a huge part of the process but often not part of the initial discussion...When we raise the discussion to the next level the CXO is looking for RoI within a year.

41 percent opex reduction
"Our story showing a 41 percent cost advantage with a single operating system over those vendors that have multiple OS is pretty compelling, but we have to be able to articulate that at the right level.

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