Ruckus President Rabinovitsj On The Company's Channel Renaissance And How Partners Can Make Bank While Taking On Cisco Meraki

Clear And Open Space

Dan Rabinovitsj is pumped up. The company he leads, Ruckus Wireless, has been acquired officially by Arris International after a long and eventful year of transactions and delays.

Now, "we have clear air and open space ahead, which is exactly what we wanted," he said in an interview with CRN. Rabinovitsj, who was COO at Ruckus, is now president of Ruckus Networks, a unit of Arris that will be known in-house as Enterprise Networks.

Rabinovitsj says the time it took to get the Arris-Ruckus transaction done has allowed the companies to lay the groundwork for a smooth transition, and Ruckus is ready to hit the ground running with a tight focus on the channel's role in growing revenue in key verticals and with initiatives in the cloud.

Rabinovitsj says he understands that partners may have taken a wait-and-see approach to Ruckus as the acquisitions that surround it were sorted out, but Ruckus never took its foot off the accelerator and is encouraging partners who have explored relationships with competitors to come back and see what Ruckus can offer.

What follows is an edited excerpt of Rabinovitsj's conversation with CRN.

Ruckus is going to operate pretty independently within Arris. What does that mean for the companies' integration?

The sales force that's focused on enterprise business are integrated inside that business unit. It minimizes any integration pains as we become one company. That's a big deal, not only for our own employees, but also to maintain laser focus on what we're doing with channel partners, and our distribution partners. It's all about focus. We have a very different go-to-market model than the traditional Arris business. By setting the business unit up this way, it's acknowledging that it's a diversification play for Arris and that we are basically being chartered with growing business in the enterprise with a channel-led motion.

Are you planning any additional resources for the sales operation, such as new sales people?

We have actually built up our sales, marketing and customer support team over the past year. While we've been going through this transition, we set things up prior to the Arris transaction. We've built up resources and we're coming in planning to continue to hire, to continue to get the capacity that's required to deliver the revenue in our plan. We're pretty much always focused on delivering the revenue that's in our 2018 budget. We're committed to that.

What do you need from channel partners in order to get there?

The last year, we spent a ton of time nurturing our channel partners. We had 'Big Dogs' events, which are channel partner events, in every theater. We had many Big Dogs events in other theaters to make sure we had proper coverage. What we need from channel partners and distribution partners around the world is focus on our business. We have improved our position in terms of our commitment to the partner community, and we don't grow unless our partners grow. We are absolutely focused on finding a way to make our partners successful and, frankly, a big part of that is that we have not skipped a beat on product delivery. This past year we brought new releases of our Unleashed product to market, hitting all the milestones we promised on wireless access points, our complete renovation of our Smartzone controller, and a whole host of new troubleshooting and analytics software. All of that came on time, as promised.

It seems like you've maintained investment in products across the board.

We also made more investments in ICX switching than in the past several years. We've poured investment in to make sure we had a complementary switching portfolio. So, from the partner community, what we ask is cross-sell everything. You have an awesome portfolio with Ruckus so you can cover pretty much anything in the wireless or wired basket. And with Cloudpath and our analytics engine, we're now bringing more and more other stuff to the table, which I think becomes critical over time. We launched our cloud offer in North America, and in the next 12 months we're going to be bringing that to Europe. The other thing we need from our channel partners is to start looking at the opportunity to start selling wireless LAN-as-a-service with Ruckus cloud.

Partners have told us that they've taken their foot off the accelerator with Ruckus until they knew that things were going to turn out okay with this acquisition. What's your message to them?

I understand that. Intellectually, I can completely relate to being nervous about the state of a supplier. What I would say to them is this team did not let up off the accelerator. Internally, Ruckus did not. We had an unbelievably great quarter, and I think that's great testimony to the fact that we've been driving very hard and the partners that stuck with us have profited from that relationship. All I would say to those who were a little bit nervous is, I understand why you were nervous. Please come back and see what we can do together. I would encourage partners that have been working with our competitors to take a very, very strong look at what we're doing. We are a partner networking company. We don't have different DNA from that. We're all about nurturing the partner channel, and I think that is only going to get strengthened now that we're part of Arris. We have no distractions anymore.

Do you think you're in a better position now to compete with emerging players or established players like Cisco Meraki and gain share?

I do. It's all about focus. When we were part of Brocade, we were starting to realize some synergies around the Brocade channel, then the announcement hit and the company was, from a sales perspective, kind of distracted. We don't have that anymore. That makes it so much easier to do the right thing on a daily basis. Our partners have seen that, particularly in the last six to nine months as we've organized internally to focus on the Ruckus channel and develop this shared motion around ICX switching and wireless. Now, it just gets easier for us.

What do you want your partners to know about what Arris brings to the table?

It's dependent on the specific vertical markets. If you look at service providers in general, where Ruckus has traditionally had a strong footprint, we have that DNA and Arris' DNA is very strong with service providers, clearly. So when it comes to the service provider world, and I mean of all shapes and sizes: Managed service providers, MSPs that are going after mid-market enterprise and large service providers like famous brand-name operators around the world. In that context, we bring a gigantic portfolio and scale, and very real technology advantages. We already have a complete portfolio of DOCSIS-enabled wireless access points. If I look at one of the wedding presents of this marriage, Arris is one of the leading companies in the world when it comes to DOCSIS technology. They have all the infrastructure. We have more scale and a much broader portfolio to address a range of service provider and managed service provider opportunities.

Is Arris counting on the fact that Ruckus has a strong channel operation?

Yeah, and let's be clear: Arris has been our channel partner in the service provider market. We have a really long history of working together, and that creates a huge amount of trust with our team that you don't often have in an acquisition, so we're starting off in a great spot in terms of understanding each other's business and with trust. If you don't have a channel-led business as your primary business, but you understand that you don’t and you appreciate that, of course you're going to really allow the folks who understand that business to nurture it and grow it. This is not about let's change Ruckus' go-to-market, it's about let's try to get every single dollar of revenue growth and as much profitability as we can out of that style of business.

What market trends are you seeing that the combined company will be particularly well-suited to go after?

We've recently announced deals where Ruckus is going into high-end homes. There's a premium home market that some of our channel partners are specializing in, which is really cool. That market is growing. There's a ton of innovation that happens in the home network before it ever gets to the enterprise. Think of voice control with [Amazon] Alexa and Google Home. That's coming into the enterprise, but it started in the home. The explosion of mesh devices and cameras, physical security devices, that's all something we believe with our combined footprint we're going to take much better advantage of than our competitors. Now, we're very strong drivers in the end-user experience in the home and that continuum from the home to public venues to hotels and convention centers. That's exciting as we bring the two companies together because we have incredibly strong DNA in that context. It's a much bigger deal than people have understood and we're ready to start exploring some of those complementary opportunities.

What are your advantages in the midmarket?

There will be some advantages that come from your bread-and-butter synergies. Obviously we expect to get synergies from operations and supply chain. I don't think those will be nearly as important as the opportunity we represent for some of our channel partners to take an existing solution and take it, for example, to the premium home market. There's not an obvious immediate overlap for K-12, or higher education, but give us six months and we may come up with a whole range of innovations just looking at the combined pool of technology.

What are you seeing in the market that creates favorable conditions for Ruckus?

We love the managed services play, and we fundamentally believe that this transition is happening. A really big part of our growth right now is around companies getting into delivering wireless LAN and networking services to the enterprise. A lot of that has been built on the Smartzone investment that we made, which gives companies who take a virtual instance of that and put it in their data center, they can serve hundreds and thousands of enterprise customers as a managed service. The SMB version of that is Ruckus Cloud, and that's targeted at companies that don't want to make the investment themselves on building a large, multi-tenant, multi-cloud infrastructure. Those two things clearly are big areas of growth for us. SMB, in general, with the Unleashed product. Unleashed has gone through multiple evolutions in the past year, and that business is booming and I see a big opportunity for us to continue to grow that.

Do you have plans to push into more vertical markets?

We are expanding. After hospitality, education has really been our key focus, and K-12 around the world, we've really been focused on winning more and more and more schools. In higher education, we made huge progress in the past year, particularly in universities with 15,000 students and below. This is an area where we've had really good wins all over the world. Those vertical markets are large, and we've been growing in them. Recently, we've been making inroads into building units, multi-tenant units, managed care/assisted living and hospitals. We just won a very high-profile retail company and I'm excited about that because we're starting to see our type of technology becoming extremely important, particularly in high-touch retail environments where it's all about the customer experience.

Are all the nuts and bolts of the partner program – the partner portal, marketing assets, MDF – in place today?

Those are all in place. [Channel Chief] Raelyn Kritzer (pictured) streamlined the Ruckus Ready program. We've made it simpler, which is always a good thing for partner programs. Less complexity and less overhead is a good thing. We've added a couple of specialty areas, one in hospitality and one for smart cities. That's all in place, the marketing materials are there. I will never say that our partner program is done. We'll just keep investing in that. We've got a program for all authorized distributors for wired and wireless. We have two tiers for Select partner and Elite, and we have an education specialty vertical.

How ready are your partners to get into the cloud business?

I have been asking our partners the same question. There's certainly a class of channel partner out there that is not ready, period. They're very comfortable with the traditional on-prem deployment model, and there's good business reasons for that. I wouldn't argue that they're wrong. There are clearly a number of other channel partners that have taken advantage of [Cisco] Meraki's offer, and that has become an interesting part of their business. But there's a lot of pent-up demand for an alternative to Meraki because there's some deficiencies with the way they go to market and how they work with channel partners. We're taking a lot of lessons on that as we bring our cloud solution to market. This is a big transition, and it's a big transition for us. We're changing our view on how we go to market. We're constantly changing. Even though the underlying technology may be very similar, it is not the same business practice at all. We have embraced the difference, and we're thinking about the business in a very different way than our traditional business. And I think partners have to do the same if they want to jump on that opportunity.