Today Juniper Networks announced a new training and education program built for company partners, which focuses on areas including cloud networking, security, switching, routing and mobility etc. The Continuing Education Program is a part of the Juniper Learning Academy curriculum and gives partners the ability to select the most ideal courses for their employees.

“In turn, Juniper partners are awarded for their achievements with specialized accreditations of expertise that can be easily marketed to end-user customers and prospects to help win opportunities.”

Each course has a varying value of ‘credits’ based on its difficulty, time etc, and is based on the amount of credits a partner earns for a given area they are awarded with one of 3 designations: Sales or Technical Generalist, Advisor or Master. The addition of the Continuing Education Program is only the latest of improvements to the Juniper Learning Academy. While the program probably doesn’t carry any notably measurable value, some sort of Juniper-sanctioned badge is indeed worth mentioning to a difficult customer.

Earlier, Juniper Networks also announced their Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) security systems and Integrated SecurityGateway (ISG) firewall/virtual private network (VPN) systems in a response to Windows security issues. Additionally, Juniper had also been recognized as the Best Channel Vendor for 2011 by Business Solutions Magazine’s (BSM’s) readership – a landmark which we covered here more extensively.