Juniper Networks seeks staff as it expands in Sydney and Melbourne

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 23 August 2011 12:26

IT Industry - Strategy

The Victorian minister for technology, Gordon Rich-Phillips, has opened Juniper Networks' new office in Melbourne and the company is due to move into new offices in Sydney in two months, giving it space for double staff numbers in both locations.

The company presently employs about 50 people in Melbourne and expects to double this number over the next two or three years.

Mark Iles, vice president, Juniper Networks ANZ, said: "We have designed the new office to accommodate a doubling of staff over the next few years. We see a lot of potential from the initiatives around the NBN. We are quite bullish about the market potential in ANZ for the next three to five years.

"Melbourne is the heart of the Australian financial industry and therefore, key to our goal of increasing penetration in this sector, where we are already making headway with some of Australia's largest banks."

Iles said that he expected NBN to stimulate increased use of cloud-based services in Australia and to provide a significant technical step-up for distributed enterprises such as banks, national retailers and government agencies.

"We are looking for financial services industry expertise and we continue to look for expertise in security and in service providers, particularly because of the work we are doing with IBES [The Melbourne University based Institute for the Broadband Enabled Society, of which Juniper is an industry partner]. We want both sales and technical people, and those skills are pretty thin on the ground right now."

The new Melbourne office is in HWT Tower, an A-grade building in Melbourne's Southbank district. In Sydney, Iles said: "We have just taken some new premises in Sydney that we will move into in two months, We are staying in North Sydney but we will be doubling the size of the premises."

Overall he said that staff numbers in Australia and New Zealand were "well past the 100 mark, but we do not give specific numbers."