The VAR Guy

As he blogs from rainy New York, The VAR Guy is daydreaming about Las Vegas — which is hosting two big IT events this week: Juniper Networks’ J-Partner Summit as well as Interop. Here’s the scoop from J-Partner Summit so far.

Juniper today announced four new additions to its partner initiative:

1. JUNOS Knowledge Transfer Toolkit: A new collaborative toolkit helps J-Partners to educate their customers on JUNOS software, a single-source operating system.
2. Juniper Networks J-Partner Virtual Lab: Offering J-Partners free, anytime “virtual hands-on” access to Juniper’s product portfolio for training, education and customer demos.
3. Juniper Networks Sales Specialist Advanced Course: Exclusively for J-Partner sales engineers, this new course provides a blueprint for designing and configuring Juniper Networks network infrastructure solutions.
4. Juniper Networks J-Partner Solutions Configurator: Juniper hopes the tool makes it easier for solutions providers to do business with the company.

Juniper is one of the rare networking companies that seems to be competing successfully against Cisco Systems and the economy. The company last week reported a 66 percent jump in 1Q net income, which topped $110.4 million.

Revenue also grew substantially, reaching $822.9 million in 1Q, up from $626.9 million in the corresponding quarter last year.

Savvy Marketing

As with previous years, Juniper is holding its big partner conference just ahead of Interop in Las Vegas. The move allows Juniper to promote its key company news ahead of rivals attending Interop. Plus, Juniper partners can more easily cost-justify attending Juniper’s event since they can double-dip and head over to Interop as well.