CRN Exclusive: Aruba Networks Launches New Opex Financing Option For Partners To Sell Aruba Central

Aruba Networks partners have a new way of selling the company's cloud-based network management platform, Aruba Central, thanks to parent company Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Aruba's North American channel chief, Jim Harold, told CRN Tuesday that partners can now rent Aruba Central to the customer for a monthly fee bundled into a service.

"Through HPE finance, we actually have some creative financing where we can now give a partner an option to offer the solution as an Opex solution to their customer," said Harold in an interview with CRN at Aruba's Atmosphere 2017 conference in Nashville, Tenn., this week. "That would mean yesterday a customer may have an option to either buy the equipment and have it managed by the partner. Today they have the option where they could buy it or the partner could then now finance it and rent it to the customer bundled into a service. The nice thing about it is there's no capital outlay from the partner and the customer doesn’t have to sign a lease with a third-party company."

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Harold said the channel is seeing more demand from customers this year seeking to buy in an Opex model versus investing in hardware.

"So we think we've got a unique solution here where we'll actually, through HPE finance, lease it to the partner -- so we'll charge them a monthly fee with no capital outlay -- and then they can charge a monthly fee back to their customer where they bundle in their services," said Harold.

Aruba recently enhanced its network management Software-as-a-Service platform by adding new analytics features targeting the retail market.

Aruba Central manages and monitors Aruba's networking solutions including access points, switches and branch gateways with zero-touch provisioning.