What happens when your partner program multiplies overnight?

Juniper Networks strives to transform how people connect, work, and live through their suite of networking products that serve the top 100 global service providers and 30,000 enterprises worldwide.

Juniper considers itself a partner-centric company. The company’s partner community includes resellers, service providers, system integrators (SIs), and distributors that work together to drive innovation, outcomes, and profitability. To build a compelling portfolio of networking solutions, they’ve brought the spirit of innovation into their partner program.  

Acquiring Mist in 2019 made Juniper’s technology partner program even more robust and ripe with potential. However, it was challenging to engage and establish trust with these new partners at scale. Account teams across companies weren't perfectly aligned, and measuring partner-enabled and partner-influenced revenue wasn't possible. On top of that, the thinly spread team was having trouble keeping up with all the partner applications they were receiving, which meant slow responses and longer time to value.

Pronto’s ecosystem management platform offered a welcome solution. Juniper deployed Pronto in 2021 with the goal of taking manual work out of partner recruitment, aligning better, and getting clarity on how much revenue partners were generating.

Accomplishing more with the same amount of resources

Pronto's partner onboarding feature immediately streamlined the process. Juniper created a technology partner application form, published it online, and started collecting responses in a matter of minutes. Forget spreadsheets – teammates now use this shared space to review submissions and contact applicants. This has allowed Juniper to evaluate 5x as many partners in the same amount of time. As a result, partners are inducted into the program faster and the Juniper team frees up time to tackle strategic, high ROI work.

Additionally, Pronto’s dashboards and analytics tools support revenue splits, which made it possible for Juniper and their partners to track direct vs. influenced revenue for the first time. New partner pipeline was also created and pursued as a co-sell motion. “If you're engaged in a sales motion, what is really making partnerships successful? What are the ROI benefits? You get real-time visibility with Pronto,” noted Harbans Kaur, Business Development & Alliances at Juniper, during our webinar.

In fact, reporting became so much easier that each Partner Manager was able to cover 3x more partners than before. "With Pronto's unified ecosystem management platform, we're able to collaborate seamlessly with our technology partners, improve our teams' productivity, and visualize the trends and patterns together with our executive teams," said Craig Strachman.