QoS - a Juniper training centre for Latin America

A training centre run from inside an integrator is a specific arrangement with a specific advantage: the instructors are the engineers who implement the networks, so the course material is tested against deployments rather than only against a curriculum. It has a matching risk, which is that teaching capacity competes with billable project work for the same people.

One detail from its 2016 announcement is worth keeping because it describes a real friction in certification: students previously finished a course and then travelled elsewhere to sit the exam, adding cost and delay. Offering the exam at the same place and on the same date removed a gap that had nothing to do with learning and everything to do with logistics - which is the kind of problem that decides how many engineers a country actually certifies.

QoS is one division of Grupo Binario, which was created in Sao Paulo in 2005 and split its work between Binario for integration and QoS for professional services, with a third mobility division for a period. By 2018 the group had more than 150 staff and five branches, and ran its own warehouse in Miami to shorten the import cycle - a detail that says a good deal about what selling network equipment in Brazil actually involves.

The Juniper training began in 2006, a year after the group was founded, and by 2016 had put 3,208 students through 389 classes. The group held around 80 Juniper-certified professionals and more than 200 certifications between them, reaching Elite partner level and taking Juniper's Americas Services Partner of the Year award for 2017. In 2016 QoS began running the certification exam on the same day as the course, which removes the gap in which most candidates quietly never sit it.