Many have commented here about Engineering. These issues are even more prevalent in Marketing. The CMO has a web of friends and family that work their, meshed in with Johnathan D’s network of friends, mostly ex-cisco. A highly incompetent college room-mate of the CMO works remotely in a director role, managing budgets and projects and has survived many rounds of layoffs moving jobs and teams. New college grads as well as new hires are frequently brought in from outside, often the children of MM’s marketing exec buddies. There are other important roles related to technology or competitive importance that have been generously handed out to other incompetent children former juniper execs and their lovers etc. These may not be a big deal, if these people were capable of doing good work. However, they are sadly, incompetent. They stifle progress. Over several quarters, i noticed the ammount of work that has to be done by external companies or “agencies” is ridiculous for a company the size of Juniper. This is not because juniper has a huge marketing budget, but rather it is too many people in Marketing are unable to do their jobs. Sadly, the reason why we are this way cannot be blamed on the CMO alone, and there are many more who deserve to be axed along with him in Marketing. They have made bad decisions. The CMO, whacked both product marketing VPs within a span of a month last December. He has brought back another piece of sh!t from Brocade who is a glorified blogger than a technology evangelist he aspires to be. Well, marketing at juniper has been sub-par for a long time. It will be even worseif if this trend of hiring friends and family and farming out important work continues. If you hire good people, you dont have to get someone else from outside to do it. We all know it’s time to change the CMO, but it’s also time to clean house in Marketing. The friends and family who “manage” mostly outside agencies that do the real work, the interns, and new college grads who get hired because they are known to the CMO, or some other exec. For those that have ignored this for so long, take a look at the marketing organization at Arista, who is running circles around Juniper.
Sometime back the CMO MM was quoted in an interview that he had no way to correlate the sales pipeline to his marketing spend. He should have been fired then, together with his team of “good looking” incompetent marketing goons. Better late than never to drain that marketing swamp. Maybe the board can step in and inquire whats going on, as rami has no balls to do it.