After spending all day in airports and on a plane, your humble correspondent is home from the Juniper Networks Americas Partner Conference. And now that I have a stable Internet connection again, I can share some additional perspectives on the roadmap laid out by the networking and security provider’s new channel team for the next year, spelled out by Juniper Senior Vice President for Partners-Americas Frank Vitagliano, Vice President of Worldwide Partner Marketing Luanne Tierney and VP Americas Marketing Peter Finter. Here’s the scoop:

Juniper’s newfound appreciation for the cloud revolution is a natural extension of the company’s hardware roots, Vitagliano said. The company started out trying to build a better router, and when it became clear people were starting to look for security in their networking hardware, Juniper shifted its business to accommodate. Similarly, Vitagliano said if Juniper’s “maniacal focus” on networking and infrastructure leads the company toward the cloud, then that’s where it’ll go.

Where Juniper partners fit in is simple, Vitagliano said: Part of being a better partner to the VARs and MSPs represented at the conference is helping them build a business around cloud support and services. The other parts are mostly marketing: Vitagliano said Juniper’s technology is as cutting-edge as ever — it’s the marketing and mindshare the company needs to work on if it is going to provide its resellers with what he described as “air cover.”

Similarly, Finter said being a “trusted marketing adviser,” to use the term coined during the conference, means working closely and providing every Juniper partner with the expertise and time investments they need succeed. For example, Tierney said she and her cohorts plan to show VARs simple techniques to use social media to boost attendance at locally held events and demos.

Incidentally, a contest in which Juniper awarded the VAR with the most Twitter/Facebook conference activity with an Apple iPad 2 generated a ton of buzz and kept the #JuniperPC11 hashtag hopping all event long. In hindsight, I wonder if that was one of Tierney’s techniques.

Tierney and Finter want partners to know they have the expertise and the support network in place to help them succeed.

Tierney boiled it all down:

“Marketing is now a competitive advantage.”

The Juniper Partner Conference may be over, but The VAR Guy (both blogger and website) will be keeping as close an eye on Juniper as ever, so keep watching.

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