Al Khaleej to offer Juniper training in KSA

Al Khaleej Training and Education is to begin offering Juniper courses in Saudi Arabia following a move by the networking vendor to establish its first in-country training provider in the Kingdom.

The IT and administrative education specialist will kick off the relationship next week by delivering Juniper infrastructure and security training at one of its branches in Riyadh.

Al Khaleej is one of the region’s leading training providers, boasting 1,400 staff and more than 80 offices. It holds the local franchise for global powerhouse New Horizons, which offers authorised certification programmes from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle.

Juniper is keen to exploit Al Khaleej’s presence and is hopeful that the company can repeat the training momentum it has created for rival Cisco in Saudi Arabia. Juniper also harbours plans to embed its curriculum into a two-year diploma.

Juniper’s enterprise channel boss, Taj El-Khayat, confirmed Al Khaleej’s appointment and said the firm would be responsible for training all parties handling its technology.“It will include our service provider customers, enterprise customers and our channel partners,” he explained. “We also want to start giving customers that use our equipment today access to such training. And, at the same time, our efforts will be around developing campaigns to build certification capacity on our platforms, specifically JUNOS software capabilities.”

Juniper intends to pursue a decentralised training model by signing up specialists that can offer courses locally. The vendor is currently weighing up its options in Pakistan and Egypt, while it is keen to tap the reach of New Horizons in smaller markets such as Kuwait and Oman.

The tie-up with Al Khaleej does not alter Juniper’s alliance with UAE-based Spectrum, its long-term Authorised Education Centre partner in the region, according to El-Khayat.

“I think that with the addition of Al Khaleej, Spectrum will be able to focus more into the UAE,” he explained. “The relationship with Spectrum is very healthy, we have been able to do a lot more with them this year than before so we are definitely counting on them. They will always be the guide for the other new training providers as we set them up because until they get up to speed Spectrum will be the point of contact.”