Juniper Networks announced their growth plans for India with more focus on channel business. The company spent 20 percent of its total revenue in India in the last quarter, which is the highest in the industry, claims the company. Juniper India increased its number of channel partners from 25 to 165 within two years.

Consequently, the company will be spending more than 50 percent of its investments in India for enhancing their channel partner programs and trainings. Juniper India's major focus areas this year will be telecom, government, defense, BFSI, manufacturing & ITS. The company expects that the government sector will drive huge business in the coming days.

"The State Wide Area Network (SWAN) project, initiated by the state governments, will be a great opportunity for us and our partners. We have already started working with the state governments of Himachal Pradesh and Bihar to build networks and are bidding with four more states. We have partnered with all the major system integrators to execute these projects," said Nagendra Venkaswamy, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Juniper.

Juniper has plans to also focus on the emerging markets like broadband, IPTV and value- added services. As part of its effort to address the US$400 million switch market in India, Juniper launched the first EX-series of Ethernet switches in January this year. The company foresees a huge potential in the switch market in India. "Switch is a new attraction for our channel partners along with our entire product range. We expect our channel partners to embrace switching and routing products in the coming year," said Venkaswamy.

The company has already bagged four orders for switches in the country. "We had about 800 prospective customers coming in for our roadshow, which we conducted during the launch of our switches," added Venkaswamy.

Juniper India will be investing more in every quarter for channel training programs. They also have plans to come up with more product launches and roadshows this year. The company plans to tap the SMB sector through their distributors and also to penetrate into Tier II towns with the help of distributors and their partners.

However, the company is going to be very cautious while partnering with more companies. "We are planning to increase the number of partners on a need basis. We don't want to cannibalize our partner base. We are going to be very conservative in the way we increase our channel partners. Instead of partnering aggressively with many number of channels, we look for partners who can add value to our products with their spread and technical expertise," said Venkaswamy.

India is the fastest growing center for Juniper in APAC and the fifth largest in the region. Juniper networking products run on the single operating system- Junos. The company claims that this gives them an advantage over their competitors. This also makes it easy for their channel partners to sell and support Juniper's products.

The company anticipates a huge market of about $900 million in India for networking products. The company spent about $160 million for the R&D activities in the country in the first quarter. Juniper also announced that it had doubled the size of its R&D center in Bangalore. The India R&D center contributes to all infrastructure, security and switching products along with software and hardware development, customer support, program management, product line management and educational services.