Aruba jumps into HPE’s GreenLake

Aruba will jump into HPE’s GreenLake technology-as-a-service offering on 1 November.

The company’s vice president of worldwide channels Donna Grothjan yesterday told CRN the new offering will mean that end-customers can turn to Aruba for hardware and network operations services. But Grothjan said it will also be entirely possible for Aruba partners to operate the GreenLake portal on behalf of their clients.

Grothjan also pointed out that Aruba partners can create their own network operations centre (NOC) using Aruba Central, and deliver a similar experience to GreenLake by using HPE finance to fund hardware purchase. She feels partners that invest in NOCs of their own will probably be best-suited to clients who want and need more than the GreenLake experience, anyway. 

The channel chief felt Aruba’s channel won’t mind the potentially blurred lines, as they’re rapidly developing the skills to turn the company’s products into building blocks for solutions that go well beyond connectivity and security to deliver business outcomes.

That increasing capability in its channel comes in part from enablement that builds technical and industry competency, and partly from partners partnering with partners to work together on complex deals that require broad skills.

Also helping the channel is a newly-deepened partnership with AWS, which links Aruba-powered networks the Amazon cloud through a virtual gateway and then into Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). The result is consistent policy from on-premises networks into AWS VPCs. By making such scenarios possible, Aruba gives itself and the channel the chance to participate in hybrid IT deals, a necessity as more organisations stretch from their offices to the cloud.