Q&A: Aruba launches tools for resellers

CRN: How long have you been involved with Aruba Networks?
Dominic Orr: I was one of the earlier investors, that was in February 2002 - we are seven years old. I then became a board member, then chairman of the board and I became the CEO of Aruba in April 2006 with the explicit objective to bring Aruba to be a public company.

CRN: Aruba was founded during
an economic slowdown back in 2002, how will Aruba survive
this slowdown?
DO: In general you will find technology procurement comes in the following manner: when times are good, people try to over-provision because they're busy and they try to give themselves a lot of headroom so they don't have to go back and fix a problem. When times are tight, people don't want to try new things, because people are worried about job security and so on. But, when times are really really tight, you have to try new things because your existing way of doing things is no longer affordable.

I think what we have seen is exactly that. When times are good, it's good for start-ups but when times are slower, like a year ago, the bigger incumbents have a little bit of an advantage. But now, starting from last September/October, we are actually seeing a lot more calls from higher levels in our customers' organisations because they are looking for new ways of business. Fundamentally to break the incumbent's way is really where the challengers like Aruba are really taking advantage.

CRN: So you're continuing to broaden your technology?
DO: Fundamentally it's not new technology per se, but new technology that allows people to do a lot more in a much more cost-effective manner rather than incrementally adding to equipment.

CRN: So is Aruba 100 percent in the channel?
DO: Aruba's worldwide business is 100 percent channel. In the US we are 70 percent channel and 30 percent direct. But internally, (including Australia) we are 100 percent channel.

CRN: How are your partners surviving the downturn?
DO: The larger incumbents, whose partners tend to just rise on top of the brand awareness of the vendor, they do not need to add a lot of value in terms of technical know-how and application-level expertise. Since our beginning, Aruba has tried to solve the tougher problems for the larger corporations, not just in terms of wireless connectivity but also in the areas of mobility and security. Partners tend to have lots of opportunities to add value. So our partners tend to be partners that are small to medium-sized organisations that really sell their value in terms of technical excellence.

In this tough time, our partners will find that they are called in as consultants to figure out how to help customers deal with a budget that is drastically reduced. The more technically capable our partners, the more they are finding themselves busy.

CRN: Are you offering additional services such as training?
DO: Absolutely, we want to enable our partners to do training, planning and design, and also installation and maintenance support. Those are areas we try to help our partners gain incremental revenue.

CRN: You hosted an event in Sydney recently and awarded some partners with top honours. What are you looking for in a reseller?
DO: In each geography we have a different twist. Generally, what you'll find is we're rewarding partners because either they bring us new areas of business such as a new vertical or they create new applications or show technical excellence: how they can take our platforms and add value.

Another thing is technical advocacy; in the past seven years we have created a new way of creating mobility networks so users have mobility and preserve security and any of the partners who have these attributes are good partners for us.

CRN: Are you growing your local offices and reseller numbers?
DO: Like everyone else, we are planning our financials quite carefully. The next 12 months can be quite unpredictable, so relatively speaking we will hold a reasonably flat headcount worldwide. But having said that I believe the Australia and New Zealand market is really on the verge of going through an inflexion point where more and more enterprise users are going to switch from wired access to the network to wireless access. So despite the worldwide flatness of the headcount we will likely moderately increase it here.

CRN: Will Aruba be announcing any channel programs in the near future?
DO: We have a few new programs we will be rolling out to our worldwide channel partners that is primarily giving them tools to help our customers cope with the worldwide financial situation where everybody's budgets get cut. We have a major program to help our partners go in as a consultant to the end-user and say, "With a reduced budget, how can you still implement your users' connectivity, mobility and security requirements in the main campus as well as the branch office and telecommuting areas?" Some tools and product programs associated with that are in the channel training program. I launched this in the US just last month and the program has been
very well received.

CRN: Tell us about the security side of the business, is it growing?
DO: The interesting thing is that in the traditionally networking industry of infrastructure, networking is measured separately from security. That is because networking is from a wall jack to another wall jack, and security is imposed to protect the so-called secure connection inside the building to the insecure connection that is pointing to the extranet or the Internet outside. But with mobility you no longer can identify a physical connection as safe or unsafe. You need to tie the security attribute to the user rather than the port. With wireless mobility, security is all integrated into the network infrastructure and that is what Aruba is excelling in. It's melting the market segment between network infrastructure and secure infrastructure.