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How do you see the networking market in Asia Pacific? How is it growing and why?
It's surely moving northwards. And it should continue to grow stronger. Asia Pacific is a very sizeable market due to a huge population in China and India, and we were surprised as to how rapidly Asia Pac has invested in broadband. The market will witness strong contributions on both the carrier and enterprise side. Asia Pacific presents huge opportunities for expansion because of the sheer size of the market.

How is the Asia Pacific market different from the US market?
The US market is witnessing a bit of transition, as a lot of consolidation is taking place. Once this consolidation is completed, it will end up driving the industry better. As for the Asia Pacific market, it is diverse and different from that of the US, including on the politico-economic front.

Which verticals are more lucrative for Juniper in the Asia Pac market?
There is some variation across Asia Pac. For example, Hong Kong has done pretty well on the financial services front. For China and India, massive infrastructure development is taking place and the lucrative verticals there are power and transportation. Also government, retail and financial services are big verticals.

How are you focusing on the SMB market in India and Asia Pacific?
There is a lot of interest on our part to focus on the SMB market in Asia Pacific, particularly in India and China. Although 77 of the Fortune 100 companies are Juniper's customers, that does not mean we ignore SMBs. On this front, we are betting big on managed services. Carrier partnerships play an important role here because they have established relationships with SMBs. So we need to leverage that.

What kinds of products are SMBs buying? What are the key drivers in the market?
Small and medium businesses usually operate with limited IT resources, and security may not be high on their priority list, especially compared to large enterprises which usually have dedicated IT personnel to manage enterprise security.

SMEs need to understand that the impact of a network intrusion, or introducing a virus or worm in their internal network, is very costly in financial terms and also affects the company's productivity. Juniper has been successful in addressing SME security needs with our integrated Firewall/VPN appliances for their perimeter defense. By combining firewall, anti-virus, URL-filtering, DOS and DDOS, and application level protection for common e-commence apps such as e-mails, Web, ftp, and DNS, in an appliance, SMEs can afford the best all-round defense solution even with a limited budget.

Which countries in Asia Pacific are big markets for networking products?
China, India and Japan and Australia are big markets. Some markets are not that big but we still manage to drive growth.

What are the key elements of Juniper's market strategy for Asia Pacific?
We have an overall strategy to grow and make partners. Partners need support and we will continue to invest in them. We also want to increase efficiency in managed services. On the service provider front, we continue to leverage the broadband boom.

In terms of Asia Pacific market share, how is Juniper placed vis-ŕ-vis its competitor?
We compete with a number of different local vendors in every country. Our approach – and it is something we do around the world – is to be more concerned with the customer and its requirements than with the competition. Our experience is that if you solve the customer's problems, the competition more or less takes care of itself.

Vimarsh Bajpai
vimarshb@cybermedia.co.in