HPE Aruba Banking on Channel Partners for NaaS Expansion
Aruba also plans to make investments in its data center portfolio to give enterprises more features.
![network-as-a-service network-as-a-service](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt3cf434b0de88e2c7/65240e0353c26ec7af4d81a8/network-as-a-service.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Shutterstock
Mottram said Aruba started offering NaaS a couple of years ago. However, the vendor was focusing on large enterprise contracts on more of a case-by-case basis. Those contracts number about 30, he said.
“It was more customer-led, if I’m honest,” Mottram said.
But Mottram said demand for the consumption model is rising. He estimates that 25% of customers will use NaaS by 2025.
And Aruba is tapping into the demand.
“About a year or so ago, we looked at it and thought, ‘This is a broad market-based opportunity. And what we need to do is come up with a more standardized and repeatable portfolio that can be sold by our channel partners,'” Mottram said.
Mottram said work to build commercially available NaaS offerings began about a year and a half ago.
It culminated in the company previewing eight standardized NaaS SKUs for the channel at its spring Atmosphere conference.
Those SKUs are for indoor wireless, outdoor wireless, remote wireless, wired access, wired aggregation, wired core, SD-branch and UXI.
“And then since then we’ve been working through all the systems, contracts, commercial implications of doing that,” Mottram said. “And it’s going live kind of as we speak.”
Mottram said the SKUs will help partners easily offer NaaS to customers who want it.
And for partners, the new offerings open up value.
“It’s actually a great opportunity for partners if you think about it. Because lots of partners provide those services, and that’s where they are looking to add value so they can make money. Partners don’t make that much money on just shipping the raw equipment or product itself. They want to layer on their own services,” he said.
Where do customers see value in network-as-a-service?
Mottram said he initially thought customers would adopt NaaS because of its commercial benefits.
“You move away from this one-off, upfront spend, and you move to this more predictable model,” he said.
However, Mottram said the economic side is a “distant second” to customers’ need to augment their own service capabilities.
“Most customers who buy the the NaaS offer seem to be buying more for the fact that they don’t have the time and, in some cases, the resources to manage their own network,” he told Channel Futures.
Mottram said Aruba is making investments to expand its data center portfolio.
Although the vendor’s CX switch series operates in both campus and data center environments, certain customers need advanced features for the data center. Those include support for MPLS and other protocols, Mottram said.
He said Aruba is investing money in 2023 as well as 2024 to fill out the data center portfolio.
“We think that’s a very sensible investment for the company to make. Because obviously, our customers are interested in it from a network perspective, and also we have some offers in the storage and compute space that should be able to use the same platform. So it’s a multifaceted investment from a company perspective,” Mottram said.
Mottram attributed HPE’s Intelligent Edge segment revenue growth partially to the Aruba Central platform. The cloud-based platform allows customers and partners to provision and manage their Aruba products.
Mottram said Aruba Central, which is part of the HPE Greenlake family, helps simplify life for customers and set HPE apart.
“Some of our competitors have a different management platform for different products,” he said. “We have a common platform for all of our products.”
Unified management platforms have become a more hotly demanded feature. Consider Cisco, which this summer made its Meraki platform available to provision and manage its Catalyst switch series and is promising to build more integrations.
Mottram attributed HPE’s Intelligent Edge segment revenue growth partially to the Aruba Central platform. The cloud-based platform allows customers and partners to provision and manage their Aruba products.
Mottram said Aruba Central, which is part of the HPE Greenlake family, helps simplify life for customers and set HPE apart.
“Some of our competitors have a different management platform for different products,” he said. “We have a common platform for all of our products.”
Unified management platforms have become a more hotly demanded feature. Consider Cisco, which this summer made its Meraki platform available to provision and manage its Catalyst switch series and is promising to build more integrations.
Channel partners are helping bring Aruba Networks’ network-as-a-service (NaaS) offering to market as HPE seeks to drive more recurring revenue with its GreenLake platform.
Aruba, which HPE purchased in 2015 for $2.7 billion, is earning higher accolades and expectations from its parent company. HPE’s Intelligent Edge segment, synonymous with the Aruba business, drove $965 million in net revenue last quarter. That made for a year-over-year increase of 23% (17% when adjusted for currency changes). CEO Tarek Robbiati declared that Aruba will operate as a Rule of 40 company, meaning that its combination of revenue growth and profit margin will be more than 40%.
“That’s the ambition that we have in the medium to long-term, which is to maintain high double-digit growth in Aruba and operating profit margins in the mid-20s range,” HPE chief financial officer Tarek Robbiati told analysts in HPE’s recent earnings call.
Aruba NaaS
HPE’s Tarek Robbiati
A big component of that vision is HPE GreenLake for Aruba NaaS offering. HPE is pushing its GreenLake as a service hard, and the numbers indicate adoption. HPE CEO Antonio Neri shared in the company’s recent earnings call that the total value of booked HPE GreenLake contracts has doubled over the last two years to $8.3 billion
Aruba is deepening its NaaS play, moving from a small set of customers to a partner-led, broadly available portfolio. It includes eight SKUs, announced back in the spring, that partners can deliver for customers.
Aruba’s Phil Mottram
“We’ve been putting a lot of time and effort recently into developing a more standardized and repeatable portfolio set, which we are launching with our partners kind of as we speak,” said Phil Mottram, executive vice president and general manager of Aruba.
Mottram spoke to Channel Futures about why customers are buying NaaS as well as the expansion of the Aruba data center portfolio.
Scroll through the six images above to see updates from Mottram.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email James Anderson or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like