Juniper Networks is gaining momentum with managed services providers (MSPs) that are embracing software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), according to CEO Rami Rahim. Plus, the company continues to have high long-term hopes for its hyperconverged partnership with Lenovo.
Those statements -- and several others about Juniper's channel partner program -- emerged earlier today during the company's quarterly financial call with Wall Street.
For its quarter ended June 30, Juniper announced preliminary net revenues of $1.22 billion -- essentially flat vs. the corresponding quarter last year. Also, GAAP net income was $140 million, down 11 percent vs. the corresponding quarter last year. Generally speaking, the profits beat Wall Street's expectations.
Juniper Contrail, SDN and NFV for MSPs
In describing the results, Rahim pointed to a range of business milestones in the IT channel -- including MSPs that are embracing Juniper's technologies to automate their businesses.
"Automation is fundamental not just to Juniper but to the health of our entire industry, and it is the most important attribute of our newly announced cloud-enabled brand solution, which we believe will allow enterprises and managed service providers alike to deliver on-demand cloud services seamlessly," Rahim said.
Central to that effort is Juniper Contrail, a tool for network virtualization and automation that is "enabling our customers' IT and business evolution to the cloud," he added. "In both the enterprise and service provider sectors, we already have multiple multi-million dollar Contrail deployment."
Rahim also pointed to SDN and NFV momentum with MSPs. "We believe we are in a unique position to help achieve new levels of agility and cost optimization," he said. Those MSPs, in turn, will "offer their enterprise customers best-of-breed technology choices without the complexity that typically comes from managing multi-vendor solutions."
Juniper and Lenovo: Partnership Update
Meanwhile, Juniper is working to build out a hyperconverged data center partnership with Lenovo's x86 server business (acquired from IBM).
The Lenovo-Juniper relationship is "still right now in the early stages in terms of putting in place the mechanics of how we're going to go after our customers worldwide, the partners and the channels that we need to work through and agree on, and also the technology integration that we are going to execute on to make sure that we provide compelling solutions to our customers," Rahim said.
As a result, real revenue momentum from the Juniper-Lenovo relationship won't likely arrive until next year, he added. "I remain optimistic and excited about the opportunity in working with Lenovo," Rahim noted. "As you know, there's a large part of the market that is interested in converged stack architectures and having really compelling servers, storage, and networking working tightly together is something that I think is going to be helpful to our business."
