XON, the pan-African ICT group, has been awarded Partner of the Year by Juniper Networks at its Third Annual Global Partner Conference held in Las Vegas.
The award is in the Middle East, Africa (MEA) Regional or Vertical Market segment and XON was one of about 800 companies that attended from 87 countries. It follows hot on the heels of XON being awarded Partner of the Year for South Africa at Juniper Networks’ awards event held in Dubai in December, 2013.
“Networking and Security is our core division upon which we have built our pan-African telecommunications and enterprise business,” says Carel Coetzee, CEO of XON.
“We invested heavily in creating one of the strongest cells of networking and security expertise in Africa since our inception in 1996 with some of the largest mobile and fixed-line network operators on the continent as our customers. This award from what is one of the top international networking vendors demonstrates for us that we have made every success of that opportunity.”
The award commemorates “outstanding achievements and commitment from leading channel partners in sales, customer service excellence, technology expertise and service specialisations”.
“We strategically invested in Juniper technologies going back as far as 2005, when the brand had little traction in the South African and sub-Saharan markets,” says Anthony Laing, GM of Networking at XON.
“Since then we’ve taken it into some key accounts such as several tier one mobile and fixed line network operators in South Africa, Namibia, Mauritius, Botswana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Kenya, Guinea Conakry, and several other African countries. We have also deployed pan-African research and education networks, uniting these institutions from across 14 African countries with 50 million people at their counterparts in Europe.”
XON’s solutions have been deployed at the core of fixed and mobile networks to enable new services, increase relevance to end users, increase revenues per user and simultaneously improve the quality of networks and the services they deliver.
Some of the types of solutions include deep packet inspection (DPI) for ascertaining what type of content which users are consuming or sharing coupled to intelligent billing systems like those used to manage voice calls.
It allows network operators to provide granular data services so that consumers can buy specific YouTube bandwidth, for example, or bandwidth for Netflix. That way they may pay a premium but they get a much better quality of service suited to the content.
“I want to personally congratulate our esteemed partners for their relentless commitment to helping our customers build the best networks,” says David Helfer, VP of worldwide channels and commercials at Juniper Networks.
“Juniper Networks is committed to enabling the long-term success of our global partners. Their achievements demonstrate how training, support and differentiation of Juniper’s products and services can create greater business opportunity for partners and deliver value for our customers.”
