**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of December’s important channel-program changes you should know.**

Juniper Networks on Monday announced numerous updates to its partner program, including a new data-center specialization and a design track focused on network architecture and design skills.

Juniper revamped its Partner Advantage program last year to focus “100 percent on accelerating partner growth.” Matthew Hurley, Juniper’s corporate vice president of global partner and field marketing, tells Channel Partners the “efforts paid off with greater partner satisfaction and financial success.”

“Partners are recognizing that Juniper’s open technology is essential to innovating and evolving their customers’ data centers and cloud infrastructure, so we’re following the course we set last year to let partners keep providing these value-added services,” he said.

The data-center specialization, as with the cloud specializations, is aimed at helping partners grow their businesses with Juniper’s private, public and hybrid cloud offerings. These partners will be endorsed and integrated as part of the data center go-to-market community within Juniper’s sales and marketing teams.

Also, Juniper will be implementing a new solutions specialist design track that focuses on skills in network architecture and design. It will improve program alignment with systems-engineer roles and job functions in the field, and “will allow our partners to optimize their training investments for their engineers,” Hurley said.{ad}

In addition, new programs housed in the Juniper Marketing Concierge are designed to enable partners to run measurable demand-generation campaigns around Juniper narratives with built-in customer relationship management.

“We moved to a more agile platform in 2015 and launched a new co-marketing platform in February – to date, approximately 1,000 partner campaigns have been executed,” Hurley said. “We also added 44 new courses in the Partner Learning Academy last year, and we’re planning to introduce even more in 2016.”

Partner input and feedback played major roles when Juniper formulated the program updates, he said.

“When we revamped the Juniper Partner Advantage Program in 2015, a big part of that was because partners were asking for a simpler, more streamlined program that would make it easier for them to address their customers’ needs,” Hurley said. “So, we did just that and rebuilt the program based on three key pillars – enablement, ease of doing business and growth – which serve as our guiding principles. For 2016, while we continue to make updates to enhance the program, we are staying the course and remaining committed to the direction and vision we outlined in 2015.”