Phil Mottram, president of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, views his strategy as a triangle. Along the bottom of the triangle is Aruba’s products and services, and he’s been actively adding more products and services along the bottom of that triangle.

HPE in February said it was buying Athonet, a private cellular network technology provider based in Italy, to expand on its edge-to-cloud and telecommunications portfolios. A couple of weeks later, the company revealed plans to buy Israeli cloud security software maker Axis Security to build out its Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) portfolio. Mottram said that there weren’t any glaring holes in Aruba’s offering catalog, but there were areas that the company needed to fortify for the future.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Aruba, under the direction of Mottram, is working to get ahead of the market for itself and for its partners to make sure that as these technologies do become mainstream, partners are educated and well positioned to take advantage. And as customers buy in different ways, Aruba and its partners will be ready with Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offerings powered by HPE’s GreenLake platform.

Mottram caught up with CRN to talk about the company’s newest acquisitions and how the technology will be an important part of Aruba’s future strategy and the importance of “getting ahead of the curve.”

Here are excerpts from the conversation.