What are your plans for propelling the company's growth in India?
We are playing in the largest spending market verticals of government, defence, BFSI and IT/ITeS. We would be getting into the very important SMB segment with our enterprise-class product portfolio, and also building and leveraging the strength of tier-2 channel. Additionally, we would participate in each major deal in our respective segments and get a fair share in the market place.

As far as our business growth is concerned, we would focus on the verticals of government-NeGP, SWANs, MMPs, CSCs etc. In the BFSI sector, we are looking at banking, public sector banks, especially those ramping up infrastructure. Also we are looking at private banks, which promise aggressive growth. Insurance is also our focus sector and we have aggressive plans for market acquisition. We believe technology plays a key role here. We are also looking at stock exchanges and following the security policies mandated by RBI.

In the defence vertical we are looking at network-centric warfare and spectrum release networks. Also on our focus is the IT/ITeS sector.

How do you plan to maximize your growth opportunities using the channel?
As far as our growth plans for the SMB sector goes, we plan for more than 100 percent growth over the next three years. This would entirely be enabled through our distribution network and tier-2 resellers. We are looking at appointing a value-added distributor covering this space and providing more than logistics support to the tier-2 partners. We would also position our security, low-end routing and emerging techno­logies (ET) portfolio to the relevant market segment.

Last year, we grew from 25 to 150 partners, and we are now a default entry in many RFPs. More tier-1 partners have expressed a desire to work with Juniper. We would continue focus on BFSI, government, IT/ITeS, defence and industrial segments. In fact today, Juniper has nine out of the top 10 Indian BFSI companies as our customer, and we expect a growth in business about 140 percent in the enterprise space.

Detail us on Juniper's overall India strategy for 2007.
We want to consolidate and grow our presence in the service provider (SP) space. All tier-1 SPs are now our customers. And we have had big wins in the NGN space. We would focus on broadband, IPTV and value-added services this year. We also want to gain leadership in security and WAN optimization, and actually have on hand a big win in state WAN, banking. All in all, we plan to perform well over the industry average again this year.

What is the key differentiator for Juniper against its competitors?
Competition is a healthy thing. What keeps us ahead is good technology and great products. The key differentiator, I believe, is the realization of the importance of transferable long-term skills, which can be used in the future as compared to technical know-how, which is ever-evolving. Technical skills can be updated but what is more important is to develop managerial skills, such as people management and customer satisfaction.