There’s been plenty of change for networking providers in recent years – just look at HPE Aruba Networking, which doubled its revenue in the last two years and accounted for nearly half of HPE’s profit in the third quarter of its 2023 financial year.
For an update on networking opportunities for partners, CRN Australia attended the Asia Pacific and Japan Aruba Atmosphere ’23 event in Bali last week.
Our counterparts at CRN US covered Aruba’s strategy at the Atmosphere ’23 APJ event in the US. Below, we’ve added more observations.
There’s a smörgåsbord of networking plays
Taking into account security, data centre, unified management, edge networking small business and other factors, partners looking to grow their networking practices have plenty to consider.
Security is a theme, of course.
“You'll see us talk more and more to customers about security-first networking,” said Aruba executive vice president and general manager Phil Mottram last week.
Last week, Aruba was pushing unified SASE – bringing together its SD-WAN and SSE (it added SSE with the acquisition of Axis) offerings to secure users and devices anywhere.
“This really completes the Aruba security story and having the ability to provide both security on and off campus right that was missing,” commented Mark Verbloot, Aruba Senior Director, Product, Solutions and Systems Engineering, Asia Pacific Region.
Aruba is also talking up consolidation of customers' platforms (more on this below), marrying Aruba products and services to the HPE Greenlake platform.
The services story continues with Network-as-a-Service (more on this below).
Also on the agenda is IoT. Last week at Atmosphere ’23 EnOcean Alliance was promoting the provision of IoT sensor data, such as air quality, energy or occupancy data, to the cloud via HPE Aruba Networking APIs, without batteries.
Wi-Fi 6E is part of the mix too. Aruba showed off a Wi-Fi 6E access point which it claimed was the world’s first self-locating access point with a high-sensitivity GPS receiver.
For the data centre, Aubra was making noise about its CX 10000 Series “distributed services” Switch, designed for scaling up East West segmentation. The “distributed” tag comes from its deployment as a “top of rack” switch.
“Typically right now, these kinds of services like centralised firewalls in data centres, things like DDoS protection, encryption, these are all performed by a very expensive firewall in a single location in the data centre,” Verbloot said.
“We deploy a 10k on top of the rack and all the services are available at the top of each rack,” Verbloot said. “With this technology we are able to distribute those services to tens, hundreds or thousands of racks.
Customers could benefit by reducing firewall costs, turning on segmentation at scale and saving time with automation.
Unsurprisingly, AI was also on the agenda last week at Aruba’s event. The vendor has a history of using AI and ML for networking use cases, with models inside its Aruba Central management and orchestration console, trained on networking telemetry from its install base.
“The more we scale out in terms of the deployment footprint, the better those insights are becoming,” Verbloot commented.
For example, someone running a retail network could use Aruba Central management platform to compare their network performance with other retail deployments. They could also use it to correlate network data to “give you a prediction about what might be happening on the network and a recommendation.”
Like Cisco and others, Aruba has made environmental sustainability part of its networking story. Mottram talked up HPE’s well established financial services division, saying it had been recycling products for customers for years.
“In 2022, we took back 3.6 million assets from customers and in 82 percent of cases we were about to renew them and give them a second life. And as part of that, we were able to buy back this equipment from customers and write checks for over a billion dollars,” Mottram said.
The consolidation push continues
Networking vendors continue to jockey for position as the overlords of customer environments.
While Aruba advocates for an open networking ecosystem, as one speaker at last week’s event said, its spokespeople also talked up demand for all-Aruba network environments.
“For the last three or four years we've had a very successful program integrating our SDWAN solutions with all the leading SSE providers – people like Zscaler and Netskope,” said David Hughes, Aruba Chief Product and Technology Officer. He said Aruba has deployed integrated solutions for hundreds of customers.
“Obviously we’re really committed to those customers and doing the right thing for them. We want to give customers freedom of choice,” Hughes said.
“But what we are seeing more and more is that the there's a pressure for the security team and networking team to work together. And that becomes much easier if they make decisions around common vendors.”
“If they still want to go down the path with other partners, we can support that environment. If they want to move forward with an all-Aruba solution, I'm really excited that now that is part of our portfolio too.”
Mottram had this to say: “If you wish to talk to most of our competitors, they all have different platforms for different problems. And customers found that really, really frustrating.”
The Aruba Central platform unifies management across the data centre and campus.
Also, as mentioned above, Aruba is marrying its products with HPE storage and compute solutions, connecting solutions to the HPE Greenlake platform
“We're making sure that as we develop new products and services and we make these acquisitions, all of the products and services feed into this common platform, because we believe that is the big differentiator in the market,” Mottram said.
Aligning networking and security is also part of this story.
"We see a convergence between network and security,” Mottram said. “Maybe four or five years ago, when you were selling networks, you just spoke to a network manager and they largely made the decision on the network. Security was like a separate conversation,” he said.
“But now, more increasingly, we see those conversations coming together. And organisations are starting to pick networks and security all in one framework."
SMB options keep expanding
Cisco has been talking up the small to medium business market for some time and last week Aruba was also doing the same.
We covered Aruba’s SMB pitch here – in a nutshell, the vendor is touting its credentials as a “one-stop shop” for user-friendly SMB networking, and the inclusion of “enterprise-grade” security and high-performance capabilities.
Network-as-a-Service looks worth keeping an eye on
Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is “quite a big business” for Aruba, with more than 1,000 people supporting NaaS and other customers, Mottram said. Aruba’s flagship NaaS contract is with Home Depot in the US, and involves installing and managing networks for around 300 stores.
Aruba is looking at scaling NaaS “across the market more broadly, and with that in mind, we've been launching some very standardised and repeatable offers from partners to take it to the market,” Mottram said.
This was one of the topics we asked Aruba’s new VP, World Wide Channel Sales, Lene Skov, about at Atmosphere ’23 APJ last week. She framed NaaS as a way for partners to grow and expand their services.
“This is a way for you guys to start delivering managed service around network,” Skov said.
She suggested NaaS will give partners “an opportunity to go out and talk to partners in special verticals” such as the education sector.
There are nine HPE GreenLake for Aruba NaaS Service Packs for partners to provide customers, based on “common wired, wireless, and SD-WAN use cases for repeatability and scalability” and including hardware, software, management and monitoring tools with a monthly subscription and fixed payments over 3- and 5-year terms.
In the US, where Aruba has launched NaaS, it is working with partners to get feedback. There, Aruba is talking to partners that are “already comfortable in the managed service space” who are interested in adding different types of network services to that.
US partners with an offering around Wi-Fi might add other network services or components to that, “expanding the service that they're already offering and then building our services into that,” Skov said.
Earlier this year, outgoing Aruba vice president of worldwide channels Donna Grothjan was asked by CRN US what the biggest challenge for the channel was – she pointed to the shift to as-a-service.
“Our partners have a sales force that has been selling in a Capex model for a very long time. With the shift to as a service the question is: How long does it take to train your sales team where [as-a-service Opex sales] becomes part of their DNA and they are able to sell in that [Opex] model? Partners need to be able to identify customers and bring to those customers the appropriate solution,” Grothjan told CRN US.
Aruba supply chain challenges “disappearing”, says exec
Aruba senior VP of worldwide sales, Alain Carpentier, got chuckles from the audience when he touched on the topic of the vendor’s supply chain while speaking on stage at the Atmosphere ’23 APJ event last week.
“I think I can say supply chain challenges are quite over,” Carpentier said, which got applause from the audience, before he added that supply “challenges” with some switching products would “disappear in the coming weeks”.
“In January next year we’ll be back to normal,” he predicted.
CRN Australia travelled to HPE Aruba Networking Atmosphere ’23 APJ event in Bali as a guest of HPE Networking Aruba.
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