XON becomes SA's first top-tier Juniper Networks partner

XON Systems has been appointed the first certified Juniper Networks Enterprise Elite Partner in South Africa. Enterprise Elite Partners are at the top of a three-tier structure at Juniper Networks.

"Juniper's products are gaining strength as the alternative to the dominant global player in the high-end business networking arena," says Carel Coetzee, CEO of XON Group.

"Juniper is the dominant player in the carrier networking space, which positions it ideally to tackle corporate networking. With the additional demand on enterprise IP networks caused by voice, video and Web-based ERP applications, today's enterprise IP network must offer the same redundancy, agility, quality-of-service (QoS) and security required from yesteryear's carrier-class networks. That is why Juniper is such a strong competitor to the current leader in this market."

Juniper's networking platforms encompass a range of products and services, from carrier-class routing platforms to highly-scalable session border controllers and secure and assured application delivery.

They are based on a common product architecture featuring the proven JUNOS modular operating system. These platforms are designed to ensure an efficient and predictable IP infrastructure, and enable secure, dependable user experiences at scale.

Coetzee believes Juniper's integrated security products are a key differentiator, particularly in the SSL VPN space, with appliances that extend secure and mobile access to employees, partners and customers, and intrusion prevention products that identify and stop network and application level attacks. The platform also includes a unified access and control application that binds the end-point with the user identity and the network, and propagates that information throughout the network for real-time policy management.

"Another key strength in the Juniper offering is that it incorporates robust and proven MPLS or multiprotocol label router," says Coetzee. "That's particularly applicable in larger networks where it brings traffic engineering, bandwidth management and QoS to IP networks." He says Juniper actively supports the trend toward virtualisation of people and resources that requires networks to be more agile and secure.

"Gone are the days where the network was just the plumbing. It has become a part of the business delivery mechanism and, while technologies like services-oriented architecture (SOA) claim to be network-agnostic, in reality communication between all aspects of the network must become more intelligent," he says. "The key to Juniper's success is the ability to supply the basic buildings blocks of the network that transition to the real-time enterprise."

Juniper's products have recently won a spate of awards. In January 2007 the Juniper Networks Secure Services Gateway (SSG) family scooped the IT Square Editor's Choice 2006 award, while the editors of another magazine, Internet Telephony, gave Juniper Product of the Year.

In February, the company continued its winning streak with three Network World awards for unified access control, unified threat management and secure access SSL VPN. It went on to garner three product leadership awards in the same month from SearchNetworking, for firewall product of the year, remote access product of the year and WAN optimisation and acceleration product of the year.