HPE Aruba Banking on Channel Partners for NaaS Expansion

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.