California-based networking technology company, Juniper Networks, has opened its new Melbourne office, creating 50 new jobs with plans to nearly double staff numbers within the next three years.

 

Juniper Networks is a global company with 47 offices and more than 9,000 staff worldwide. Its Melbourne expansion will support its Australian business partners and expand its customer base in the Australian telecommunications and financial markets. The company is scheduled to open its Sydney office in two months.

 

Mark Iles, Vice President of Juniper Networks Australia and New Zealand, said the Australian market was important to the company’s continued growth and the Melbourne office would help it make the most of the world-class talent, and leverage opportunities from the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN).

 

“Melbourne is the heart of the Australian financial industry and therefore, key to our goal of increasing penetration in this sector, where we are already making headway with some of Australia’s largest banks. We obviously hope to build on that, which is one of the key reasons why we're moving forward with this investment in the economy of Victoria and a plan to nearly double our local headcount”, Mr Iles said.

 

Juniper Networks' service provider business is already starting to feel the impact of the NBN rollout, with the company recently announcing that iiNet is trialling 100 Gigabit per second Ethernet on its backbone network.

 

Mr Iles said that he expects NBN to stimulate increased use of cloud-based services in Australia and to provide a significant technical step-up for distributed enterprises such as banks, national retailers and government agencies. He said the company would be looking for people with financial services industry expertise as well as expertise in security and in service provision.

 

Mr Iles said Juniper Networks bas been involved with the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) industry partnership program since its inception, and its recent platinum sponsorship of the program will enable Juniper to work with researchers by turning the network into an open platform.