‘Great Opportunities’ For Partners To Drive Services Growth With HPE Aruba

The eight new Aruba NaaS offers for GreenLake -- which provide flex up and flex down options for customers -- are poised to power big new services opportunities for partners, said Hewlett Packard Enterprise Intelligent Edge Business Executive Vice President Phil Mottram.

“In order to kind of get these models up and running you need someone who is going to go out and actually deploy the network on the customer’s premises, so we think there is great opportunities for partners to offer deployment services,” said Mottram, discussing the new offerings in an exclusive interview with CRN. “There’s obviously quite a lot of skill associated with those sorts of deployments in terms of working out what should go where, etc. So there is quite a lot of design professional services type offers they can add into the mix. On top of that there will be opportunities to provide additional management services. They can also plug into their own applications that they may decide to offer.”

The eight new HPE GreenLake enterprise NaaS offerings from Aruba are: Indoor Wireless as a Service; Outdoor wireless as a Service; Remote Wireless as a Service; Wired Access as a Service; Wired Aggregation as a Service; Wired Core as a Service; SD-Branch as a Service; and Aruba UXI (User Experience Insight which provides network application and performance management).

Aruba is offering partners four primary channel models: a partner assessment and design model with standardized and modular service packs that can be configured by partners in three to five year subscription models; a fulfillment model that gives the partner the ability to sell the service but have Aruba fulfill it; a model for the customer to contract service levels with a partner and finally and a model where partners and Aruba team together with partners providing monthly billing and day one services for the customer.

Mottram said as far as he knows there is no other vendor that is offering a similar NaaS opportunity for partners. “I am not familiar with any other networking company similar to us with a partner friendly offer in the market today,” he said. “So I think we’ll probably be the first.”

Up until now, Aruba has been offering bespoke NaaS offers rather than standardized NaaS offers, said Mottram. “The bigger opportunity here - and we are very partner led as an organization – is to generate some offers that are more kind of standardized and repeatable but more importantly can be sold through the partner channel,” he said.