Juniper To Give Grothjan Charge Of Distribution Strategy

Juniper Networks this week plans to name a former Ingram Micro executive to its channel management team as the head of its distribution efforts.

Donna Grothjan joins Juniper as vice president of channels, a newly created position in which she will oversee Juniper's U.S. and worldwide distribution channels as well as its channel marketing and channel programs, said Tushar Kothari, vice president of worldwide channels at Juniper, Sunnyvale, Calif.

Grothjan, a 15-year Ingram Micro veteran, will report to Kothari.

Dan Wilson, vice president of vendor relations at Denver solution provider Accuvant, said he hoped Juniper's appointment of Grothjan would push the vendor to stock higher-end product lines, such as its NetScreen 5200 and 5400 integrated security appliances, through distribution.

"It should make them more comfortable in giving a little more control to Ingram Micro," Wilson said.Kothari said fitting the custom-configured appliances into a distribution model would indeed be one of Grothjan's objectives.

"Donna is going to work on several different initiatives: our distribution strategy, our channel programs, and she'll work inside the company to build infrastructure to do business in a scalable, high-volume manner," Kothari said.

Juniper entered the enterprise market earlier this year with its acquisition of NetScreen, inheriting the vendor's 400 partners and its distribution partnership with Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro is the only Juniper distribution partner authorized to carry the vendor's full line of enterprise networking and security products.

Grothjan resigned from her post as Ingram Micro's senior vice president of product management in August, one of a spate of executives to depart the distributor in recent months.Several of Juniper's security-focused partners said they have been waiting to get Juniper's next enterprise push, its new J-series access routers, in hand before deciding whether to recommend them to customers.

"We always want to see it, take a look at it ourselves in a lab environment to see if it does what it promises to do," said Steve Fuller, president and CTO of NetWorks Group, a Juniper partner in Brighton, Mich.

The J-series routers, expected earlier this fall, just began shipping.