By combining leading technology with strong partnerships, Juniper is helping businesses build better networks, deliver better service to their customers, and create new opportunities for growth
The technology landscape is evolving rapidly, with businesses facing increased pressure to adapt to AI-driven innovations, ensure seamless connectivity, and optimize data center operations. As companies seek to scale and future-proof their operations, there is a growing need for solutions that are not only flexible but also enable partners to deliver real-time, impactful results for their customers.
In this context, Juniper Networks has announced a new evolution of its partner program, Juniper Partner Advantage 2025, which is set to help partners overcome these challenges and capitalize on new opportunities. With businesses pushing for more efficient solutions that drive growth while simplifying operations, Juniper’s enhanced support and incentives for partners couldn’t come at a better time.
To get a hang of the inner matrixes of Juniper’s Partner Program, SME channels had spoken to Harshavardhan Kathaley, Director – Partner Sales, India & South Asia at Juniper Networks to understand how businesses can navigate these shifts and leverage Juniper’s offerings to unlock growth.
“We offer programs that are easy to navigate, rewards that are based on clear performance goals, and tools that help them grow faster and serve customers better.”
– Harshavardhan Kathaley, Director – Partner Sales, India & South Asia at Juniper Networks
As Director – Partner Sales, India & South Asia at Juniper Networks, Harsh leads the company’s partner ecosystem and drives strategic sales initiatives. His role spans both regional and vertical markets, with a focus on empowering partners to design and deliver AI-Native, cloud-ready and secured intelligent networks that meet evolving customer needs.
Previously, Harsh held leadership roles at Ingram Micro and Avaya, where he oversaw channel sales, business operations, and partner strategy. He played a key role in building agile, high-performing channel ecosystems.
Harsh champions “deliberate and dependent partnering”—a philosophy rooted in trust and shared outcomes. He is committed to creating win-win partnerships that deliver mutual growth, embrace innovation such as AI-led transformation, and drive long-term value for all stakeholders.
In this SME Channels exclusive, the channel veteran reveals his business priorities; how Juniper’s current market strategy aligns with its overall channel policy; Juniper’s business-critical industry collaborations; the uniqueness of Juniper’s Mist AI-Native Networking platform; the evolving threatscape in India; and much more. Edited excerpts…
What is Juniper’s current market strategy and how is it aligned with your overall channel policy?
Juniper’s market strategy focuses on helping businesses build smarter, faster, and more secure networks by putting AI at the center of everything we do. As companies move faster toward digital transformation, there is a growing need for networks that can operate automatically, fix problems before they happen, and support the demands of cloud-based services. Juniper is helping customers meet these needs with AI-Native solutions that are simple to use, reliable, and secure.
Our partners play a key role in bringing these solutions to the market. We are fully committed to their success by offering programs that are easy to navigate, rewards that are based on clear performance goals, and tools that help them grow faster and serve customers better. Programs like Partner Advantage and Elite Plus are designed to create strong, two-way relationships that help both Juniper and our partners succeed.
Our channel approach is based on simplicity, openness, and shared growth. We give partners access to our full range of AI-Native solutions, offer flexible pricing and sales options, and provide tools to make selling and delivering services easier. This allows partners to grow their businesses, offer more to their customers, and tap into new markets.
By combining leading technology with strong partnerships, Juniper is helping businesses build better networks, deliver better service to their customers, and create new opportunities for growth.
Would you please elaborate on Juniper’s recent collaboration with Google Cloud?
Juniper’s collaboration with Google Cloud marks a major step forward in helping enterprises transform their branch and campus networks for the AI era. Through this partnership, customers can now easily subscribe to Google’s Cloud WAN solution alongside Juniper’s Mist AI-Native wired, wireless, secure SD-WAN, network access control (NAC), and firewall services all with just a few clicks via the Google Cloud Marketplace.
This integrated solution combines the global scale and reliability of Google Cloud’s infrastructure with the intelligence and automation of Juniper’s Mist AI-Native Networking Platform. Together, we are helping enterprises deploy new branches faster, simplify operations, enhance security, and optimize user experiences across devices, applications, and clouds.
As AI applications and cloud-based services continue to grow, the need for reliable, low-latency, and secure connectivity has never been greater. Powered by AIOps, Juniper’s Mist platform ensures proactive issue resolution, self-driving automation, and consistently high-performance networks. This partnership directly addresses the operational complexity, security challenges, and inconsistent application performance that many businesses face today.
By working together, Juniper and Google Cloud are enabling organizations to build agile, secure, and cost-effective networks that are ready for the demands of AI, cloud, and next-generation digital transformation.
What’s unique about Juniper’s Mist AI-Native Networking platform? How can it help optimize user experiences?
Juniper’s Mist AI-Native Networking Platform is built to make networks smarter, easier to manage, and more reliable by using artificial intelligence at the core. It constantly gathers data from across the network including Wi-Fi, switching, WAN, security, and data center devices — and uses AI to automatically detect issues, fix problems faster, and optimize performance without heavy manual work.
Recent updates have made Mist AI even more powerful. It now gives network teams a full view of how data moves across the network, helping spot and solve complex issues before they impact users. New tools also allow businesses to connect their own AI systems for even faster troubleshooting, and automatically adjust the network to meet application needs, ensuring smoother and faster connections.
Mist AI helps businesses deploy branches faster, cut operational costs, and deliver a better experience for every user, device, and application. It makes networks more predictable, secure, and easy to manage, giving IT teams more time to focus on innovation instead of firefighting.
As a pioneer in secure, AI-Native Networking, how do you look at the evolving threatscape in India?
As a pioneer in AI-Native Networking, we view the evolving threatscape in India as an incredible opportunity due to rising complexity. With the rapid 5G deployment, cloud migration, IoT expansion, and the growing AI-driven applications—the role of networking has transformed. Networks are no longer just the plumbing infrastructure; they are now the digital nervous system of enterprises, expected to be intelligent, agile, and aiding to deliver business outcomes. For India specifically, our scalable, cloud-ready, AI-native network architectures are helping businesses and service providers stay ahead of the curve. We are also seeing strong momentum in verticals like banking, manufacturing, healthcare, and education, where high-performance, low-latency, and mission-critical networking is a must.
By leveraging AI and machine learning at the core of our solutions, we enable networks to self-monitor, self-heal, and continuously optimize performance. Whether it’s automated root cause analysis, predictive performance insights, or intent-based orchestration, our platforms like Marvis and Mist AI as well as tools like Apstra and Paragon are setting new heights in network efficiency and user experience.
But as networks become more intelligent and distributed, they also become more exposed. That’s why, at Juniper, security is not an add-on; it is natively embedded across the entire network. From the edge to the core, and across multi-cloud environments, we deliver unified threat detection, zero-trust enforcement, and automated policy management. In a time when cyber threats are becoming complex, our AI-Native, security-first networking approach ensures Indian organizations can move forward with confidence in scaling their digital ambitions without compromising on safety.
Please shed some light on your geo-spread in the India market.
Juniper has built a strong and growing presence across India, supporting customers and partners throughout the country. Along with our partners, we have established presence across India’s major metros and fast-growing Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Our solutions are deployed in all the key verticals such as telecom, BFSI, IT/ITES, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and government. We have active presence in regions like Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Kolkata while also covering cities like Ahmedabad, Kochi, Jaipur, and Bhubaneswar etc. We go all-out to stay close to our customers through localized partners and regional system integrators. We ensure customers across geographies receive consistent, high-quality engagement and service support. As the demand for cloud, data center modernization, and AI-driven networking grows beyond traditional geo locations, we’re well-positioned to scale with India’s evolving digital ecosystem.
What is your growth roadmap for next year?
Over the next year, Juniper’s focus will be on strengthening our leadership in AI-Native Networking and expanding our presence across key growth sectors. With our AI-Native secured networking solutions, we’re confident of driving significant growth in India while helping customers build networks that are self-driving and secured. Our focus will remain on delivering measurable business outcomes for the customers viz. faster roll-out, reduced operational complexity, improved end-user experiences. Our growth plan for the next year is built on three focus areas: using AI to drive innovation, growing our partner network, and delivering great value to our customers. We aim to expand the use of our AI-powered networking solutions in key industries like telecom, banking, government, and large enterprises. We’re also focused on strengthening our partner network across India. By training and supporting our partners better, we can reach more cities and help more organizations in those markets. With AI at the heart of our technology and security built in from the start, we’re confident we’ll grow strongly in the year ahead.
