Juniper Networks has announced its new application acceleration strategy that hinges on three components: accelerate more applications, leverage visibility and reporting, and increase reach and scalability.

Application acceleration involves use of specialized networking devices and software that optimize how data is sent over the network for maximum capacity utilization of the available bandwidth and to speed up access. It is especially useful for organizations spread across different geographical regions and those who have remote users logging into the network.

In India the company is mainly targeting large organizations in the financial, government and manufacturing segments through partners such as Wipro Infotech, Apara Enterprise Solutions, Sify and Avaya, according to Benny Lim, sales manager of Emerging Technology division (Southeast Asia and India), Juniper.

Speaking about the India channel plans, Upender Jit Singh, Juniper's channel sales manager (India & SAARC), said, "Juniper is a channel-driven company. Through our distribution tie-up with Ingram Micro, we currently have about 150 reseller partners across India." Without revealing numbers, he said this number would certainly go up.

The main qualifying criterion for becoming a Juniper partner, said Singh, is the number of certifications the channel member has. The resellers can apply for partnership through Juniper's website, and receive a response based on Juniper's evaluation of their credentials.

According to Singh, Juniper is focusing a lot on training and certifying the channel community through seminars in different regions of India. The course material is also available on the company's website. While sales and post-sales modules are for free distribution, post-sales training entails a fee.

Of late, many large networking companies have been focusing on application acceleration, which offers the benefits of lower operating cost through server consolidation, ease of data back-up and speedier access to content and business applications. According to Frost & Sullivan, the total WAN application acceleration market in Asia Pacific is estimated at $133 million in 2006 and expected to grow at a CAGR of 45% from 2006 to 2010.