Juniper Partner of the Year 2022

Joel Sweeney , Xpertex CEO - I was lucky enough to join the 瞻博网络 Executive Summit in Madrid this week, where the theme was “#JuniperUnleashed”. The scene was set by Gordon Mackintosh, Group VP of Global Channels and Virtual Sales. He, and all of the other presenters communicated Juniper’s desire to double their Enterprise footprint in the next two years.

Juniper have been on the acquisition and have added Mist AI, Apstra Intent-Based Data Centre and 128T (now called Session Smart Routing (SSR)) SD-WAN to the portfolio. They are in the top-right of several Gartner Magic Quadrants and have the competition firmly in their sights.

I attended several sessions during the three-day summit including some interesting sessions from Juniper along with some independent speakers such as Jono Bacon who spoke about how to build a “community” that grows into a “movement” over time. He is a pioneer of Open Source and held community-related positions at GitHub, Canonical (Ubuntu) and OpenAdvantage among others. One story that stuck in my mind is how a team in Malta developed Apps for a smartphone Operating System they were developing for free! Because they could and wanted to.

There are too many exciting presentations to list here, but the most disturbing, yet uplifting story was the Keynote presented by Aron Ralston. For those of you that have seen the film 127 hours, you will be aware that Aron was the guy that had an orienteering accident in deep, remote Utah that resulted in him having to cut off part of his arm to survive. He was trapped by a boulder for 5 days and the way he described his thought processes throughout, and how the love for his family made him realise what was important in life was awe-inspiring.

When he finally (after 5 days) set himself free, he thanked the boulder for the experience whilst drawing parallels throughout how we all have boulders in our lives that we need to overcome.

On day 2, we were taken to a large warehouse venue where there was lovely food, Flamenco dancers and a live band. A great night was had by all.

The “icing on the cake” moment also came on day two when I sat through the awards session. Partner awards for The Americas, EMEA and APAC came and went, and I thought to myself “….maybe next year, Xpertex will be up there…”. The session then moved on to “Worldwide Partner(s) of the Year” and during the EMEA slot, much to my shock and surprise we were awarded “Connected Security Partner of the Year” and “a “Worldwide Partner – EMEA” award, depicted by the yellow and blue ribbands?that were applied to my badge prior to being present the award by Gordon Mackintosh –

https://juniper2022partneroftheyear.splashthat.com/

This is a great achievement for Xpertex and the wider team and this award is down to the hard work and dedication in delivering over $3.8M throughout 2022, with a large proportion of the sales comprising the Juniper SRX Firewall range.

I was delighted to accept the award on behalf of the whole Xpertex Ltd Team and wider Exponential-e Group.