Juniper Networks bets big on government sector

NEW DELHI: Placing big bets on opportunities offered by the Digital India programme, networking solutions provider Juniper today said it will actively participate in the government projects albeit with a "selective" approach.

The US-based firm, which has about one-third of its employee base in India, is already working with various agencies in the government and defence sector.

"We are already working with the government and defence here. This is a very big opportunity and we are working on delivering customised and localised solutions. However, we will be selective of the projects," Juniper Networks Managing Director India and SAARC Amajit Gupta told reporters here.

Founded in 1996 by Pradeep Sindhu, Juniper is headquartered in California, US. It registered revenues of USD 4.6 billion in 2014 and had over 8,800 employees.

"India is a key market for us. While we have been strong in the telecom segment, we see segments like government, enterprise, cable and web-scale companies being important pivots of growth for us here," he said.

Juniper today launched a new study, in collaboration with research firm IDC, that found a majority of large enterprises in India are planning to deploy Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies by 2016.

SDN is a new architecture that changes design, management and operation to make the network more practical and reliable.

According to the study, 63 per cent of large enterprises interviewed said they planned to deploy SDN as part of their network architecture in 2016.

"(About) 42 per cent of intenders and 34 per cent of users do not have a specific budget assigned to the purchase of SDN solutions. 19 per cent of intenders and 28 per cent of users are willing to consider more than 7 per cent of their IT budget for SDN implementation," IDC India Research Manager Enterprise Computing Gaurav Sharma said.

About 86 per cent respondents felt enterprise networks of the future will be a combination of SDN and traditional networks.

They also cited initial concerns like difficulty in integrating SDN with already deployed or available infrastructure, security concerns, technical skill gap, total cost of ownership, and lack of management, Sharma said.