Juniper Schedules Global Partner Conference For January

Juniper Networks executives previously said that the company would combine its theater-based partner conferences into one global event for the first time in 2012. Luanne Tierney, vice president, global marketing, in late July indicated to CRN that the event would take place in May 2012 in an East Coast U.S. city.

Instead, the conference is now scheduled for Jan. 16-18, 2012 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Through a Juniper spokesperson, Tierney confirmed the move and said the reason was that because it's Juniper's first-ever global conference, Juniper wanted it to be its first major event of its new fiscal year, which is the same as the calendar year.

A global partner conference is one of several new marketing and networking resources being offered to Juniper partners by Tierney and Juniper's bolstered channel executive team, which includes Frank Vitagliano, senior vice president, Americas partners, and Emilio Umeoka, senior vice president, worldwide partners. Both Tierney and Umeoka -- along with a number of other new Juniper executives -- joined the company this year.

Juniper's Americas partner conference had traditionally taken place in the spring. The move to January means Juniper, which recently swept the enterprise networking category of Everything Channel's Annual Report Card, has one of the first major channel events of the new calendar year, and will also be three months before rival Cisco's 2012 Partner Summit, scheduled for the week of April 16 in San Diego.