“Revolutionizing the Network”

For Marcus Jewell, CRO, Juniper Networks, the key is being Authentic, be who you are, not who you think you are. “Humility is the other key; all leadership is a privilege, being born in a wealthy county and having access to a good education means I already won the cosmic lottery so being able to lead is like winning the lottery twice,” he says. Marcus has culminated into a steadfast leader by honing the best of his skills and working hard to enhance himself in all aspects. This is how he has been taking the company to new heights.

Juniper Networks is leading the revolution in networking, making it one of the most exciting technology companies in Silicon Valley today. Since being founded by Pradeep Sindhu, Dennis Ferguson, and Bjorn Liencres nearly 20 years ago, Juniper’s sole mission has been to create innovative products and solutions that meet the growing demands of the connected world.

Juniper Networks [NYSE: JNPR] is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with over 9,000 employees in 70 countries and nearly $5 billion in revenue. By challenging the inherent complexity in the Cloud + 5G + AI era, the company’s solutions power the connections that matter most - from education to healthcare to secure banking. “We enable everything. Juniper solves the most complex connectivity issues for the modern world. Without us nothing works, banking, retail, healthcare, education could not function without us,” adds Marcus. That is a big responsibility and an exciting one. “Even when we’ve achieved that goal, we are always looking for ways to improve. The objective is to compete and execute, that is the enjoyment sharing and learning to be better, there is never a perfect outcome, constant improvement is invigorating. Its keeps me grounded and means boredom is not a thing!”

"Juniper Networks’ growth has been amazing. They have transformed from a solid profitable low growth business to a high growth business by reimaging their true north and building a performance culture. Competing is the Objective, Winning is the outcome.”

According to Marcus, it's all about data, specifically Data that creates insights. He makes it a point to provide data in real-time to his sales team and then teach them how to form insights and tell stories. AI has a big impact on scanning data and focusing on what matters to our customers. “The world of sales has evolved, and many are getting left behind. I don’t subscribe to the fact that there is a revolution, but the way we operate is changing. You can no longer rely on relationship or presentation skills,” explains Marcus. “There is so much information out there we must help our customers make sense of this, which needs different skills. The good news is that Buying will never be fully automated, hence Selling cannot be automated, but it can be augmented! Human interaction will always be a part of the sales process but not the only part.”

The company came from nowhere in the Campus Wired and Wireless switching market to now lead the Gartner MQ that is the gold standard independent measure of their capability in the industry. They dealt with the customer issues and set a new paradigm. The 2 most significant issues where users could not connect to the network, and performance was often slow. It was unclear why this was happening and took a lot of support engineers, and customers are often very unhappy with their investments in this area.” We created a new Cloud-Based AI Management system that dealt with the issues and automated fixes before customers even knew they had an issue. We have countless examples where faults were reduced by 90% to the support teams. The faults still happened by our AI engine fixed them before they became an issue. In essence we made networking better rather than building better networks.”

Juniper Networks’ growth has been amazing. They have transformed from a solid profitable low growth business to a high growth business by reimaging their true north and building a performance culture. Competing is the Objective, Winning is the outcome. The team is passionately focused on experience, and technology that does not improve a customer's or user's experience is pointless. “We have transformed the Campus Market, and we will do the same to all aspects of the networking market. We have big plans for Data Centres with our recent acquisition of Apstra. This gives us the potential to lead in this segment, but we have to work hard and execute.” IE