Aruba’s David Hughes On Wi-Fi 6E, Silver Peak, And Why Aruba NaaS Has A Leg-Up On Its ‘California Competition’

The HPE-owned tech giant is leading in the Networking as a Service space and is selling a “ton” of Wi-Fi 6E to boot, which means more for Aruba partners, former Silver Peak CEO and current Chief Product and Technology Officer Aruba David Hughes told CRN.

Networking On The Next Level

Aruba Networks’ parent company Hewlett Packard Enterprise is coming in hot to the Everything as a Service (XaaS) space with eight new HPE GreenLake Networking as a Service (NaaS) offerings, including Indoor and Outdoor Wireless as a Service and SD-Branch as a Service. The new offerings are giving customers the flexible, consumption-based IT services they’re looking for and it’s giving channel partners choice in how they go to market with customers – a win/win for all involved, according to Chief Product and Technology Officer for Aruba David Hughes.

Hughes, the former Silver Peak founder and CEO until Aruba closed on its acquisition of the SD-WAN specialist in 2020, believes that bringing together technologies, such as networking, SD-WAN, and security, will create packaged solutions that partners can add value to by adding a wrapper of their own managed services. The XaaS trend is just a start, and the San Jose, Calif.-based company is already ahead of its California-based competition with its new offerings, he said.

Hughes sat down with CRN ahead of the Aruba Atmosphere 2022 event to talk about how the company is pursuing emerging market trends, such as XaaS and Wi-Fi 6E, and how partners can take advantage of Aruba’s – now much more flexible portfolio – to forfill the needs of the customers and go after brand-new areas of opportunity.

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

How is Aruba’s as-a-service portfolio more competitive than competing vendor XaaS offerings?

I think relative to NaaS, one of the important things to note here is that first, we’re doing it across the whole portfolio. Second, it’s available across a huge number of countries — 50 plus countries — where our competitors — and there’s just a handful in California — you can count on your fingers how many countries they have their service available. The other thing I think that’s really differentiated with this is Aruba NaaS ties into HPE GreenLake. So, this isn’t just Aruba, it’s part of GreenLake. And we’re beginning to offer, whether it’s compute, storage, or networking, everything is in this type of service model.

We’ve launched a new set of SaaS-based offerings, so eight different offers where customer is able to consume [things like] wireless and SD-Branch as a service. We’ve been at this for more than two years now and we’re doing very complicated kinds of custom projects with some big customers. We’re taking those learnings and turned it into something that’s really easy for our customers and our channel to consume. One of the things that it does is it lets partners wrap their services around the [offering] in an opex model and get everything in a single monthly payment, no big upfront costs. That takes away a big hurdle for partners that want to get into the services business and gets rid of a lot of the complexity that’s associated with other ways of doing this, like leases and so on.

What has XaaS demand been like from partners and customers?

It depends on the report, but upwards of 60 percent of respondents are saying they want they want to move in this direction as next couple of years. So, whether it’s from surveys or what we’re hearing directly from customers, you’re seeing a lot of interest in this flexibility.

I think about it in terms of flexibility. It’s not like this is the only way to do things, it’s giving people another option. It doesn’t force people down this path. But it definitely is, I think, going to accelerate the shift towards recurring business models. Another thing I think is really important for the channel is with some of our competitors, they’re looking at those things more direct. We really believe that this is an opportunity to work with the channel and for them to add monthly value to what we’re doing so they’re participating in this opportunity.

What’s adoption been like for Wi-Fi 6E and why is this technology so important?

The numbering of things is a little bit deceiving. So, you think: “The leap between [Wi-Fi] 6 and 6E must be small and seven will be big.” But when you actually look at technology, the leap from 6 to 6E is much bigger than the leap from 6 to 7 because 7 doesn’t increase the spectrum at all. [Wi-Fi 6E] is growing like crazy — we’re shipping a ton of Wi-Fi 6E. We think that it’s really transformational. It doubles the spectrum available for communication. We want to remind people to stay focused on the on the here and now value of Wi-Fi 6E, which is tremendous. We’re seeing a big uptick and one of the predictions I have for 2022 is we’re going to see 20 percent growth throughout the year.

I think as people are looking at going back to [the office] and hybrid work over the next two quarters, there’s an opportunity to refresh and get ready for what’s next. When you think about the amount of traffic generated by Zoom and when you go back to the office, we’ll be doing a lot more Zoom with colleagues who aren’t in the office. These kinds of things are really driving people to think about if a refresh makes sense, and as long as the country has this spectrum available, then it makes sense.

How is the Silver Peak integration going?

If you think about it, in terms of maybe a four or five phase [integration] plan, we’re at phase three or four of the plan. There’s still more that we have in store but we’re well down that path and we’re really excited by what we’re bringing together for our customers. The [merging of the Aruba and Silver Peak partner programs] is happening in the second half of this calendar year.

One of the other big announcements that we’re making at Atmosphere is we’re bringing together all of our WAN-facing capabilities under EdgeConnect, the premier [SD-WAN] offer from Silver Peak. We’re going to be launching a full suite of capabilities to EdgeConnect Mobile, to EdgeConnect Micro Branch, to EdgeConnect SD-Branch, to EdgeConnect Enterprise. What’s really unique is all of these connects to a single SD-WAN fabric and are all the managed by Aruba Central. In contrast, most of our competitors have different pieces, or they have different architectures, and you need to choose to go down one route with one set of products or a different route with a different set of products. With the acquisition, we’re blending and Silver Peak and Aruba together, but rather having things go on separately, we’ve invested really significantly over the 18 months since the integration on bringing them all together.

What’s one of the biggest challenges partners are faced with right now and how is Aruba helping?

One of the major challenges is how do [partners] participate as the economy shifts from buying devices to buying services. We’ve all seen it in our personal lives where people are less worried about buying a particular thing and are more interested in buying experiences and outcomes. When you think about something like Amazon’s Alexa, nobody cares about what kind of CPUs and how much RAM she has. They just care about whether the answers are right and the things they order will be there the next day. That shift is happening on the consumer side and it’s also happening IT. This move from devices to services and outcomes I think our partners are really looking for how they add value and how did they manage through this transition. And so, these NaaS offers are a big part of us enable enabling them to be to be part of this transition.

Our partners and distributors are super important and key to everything that we do. We’re only going to be successful with them. The focus around Network as a Service is something that I think is a really big opportunity for them. It’s also a learning opportunity for both of us together as we as we go to market and figure out what makes sense as we take the next steps.