Aruba sees a growing wireless market in India

In a chat with VARINDIA, Steve Wood, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company has discussed the growth that Aruba has witnessed post merger with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, growth of global channels and also about technology innovation 

Latest technologies like mobility, IoT and Cloud are influencing the traditional businesses.HPE Aruba builds smart networks that are insightful and predictable to accelerate the transition. The merger between HPE and Aruba hasput the company in a strategic position where it has gained a double digit growth and is also optimistic of acquiring a major share in the market.

The company has strong foothold in countries like Australia and Japan. Moreover, India is the most promising market for Aruba and also the fastest growing in APJ region. 

Talking about the future roadmap, Steve mentioned that the company will continue to deliver innovative products and encourage Cloud Networking.

How have you witnessed the growth, post merger with HPE?
Aruba has witnessed double digit growth in the business, particularly on the wireless side and is still continuing to grow. According to the market predictions, the wireless system is going to grow. We are looking to grow much faster than the predictions of the market. The growth will be onset of new opportunities that we see with the government’s push towards Digital India and we are in a good position to lead in both wireless and wired segment. The SOHO, SMB, mid-range, top end large Enterprise market have lot of different layers with different players in that area. Being a part of HPE has opened doors to larger accounts and has also provided us the opportunity to expand our reach. 

In which countries you have strong presence?
In APJ, we are strong is Australia, Japan where we opened our first international office. It’s been 12 years in Japan and we have built a good market position and lot of good partners with deep relationships on the Aruba side. Then when we merged with HPcompany, we are able to integrate them together and build a combined channel and channel program focused on the components that Aruba liked to deliver to help channels perform. In APJ, India is definitely the fastest growing market for us. We also have a strong position in China. 
We also have our Research and Development centers in both Beijing and Bangalore. 

How is the global channel doing for Aruba?
The global channel is doing very well. I really enjoy working with people from the channels team who can legitimately compete with the biggest competitor in the market for us. With the merger of HPE and Aruba, we have started winning a lot of business. With integration into HPE’s business, we now have access to bigger accounts. As we’ve grown larger we have found opportunities to create new relationships and spend time educating customers about our solutions.

What are the key components in your solutions that can control the spam ware or malware?
When we talk about security it is physical security. This is done by not leading you on the network and being contextually aware of where you are, who you are, what device you are using, authentication and allowing the network manager to control the liking. So that sort of security is very hard to get because the perimeter of the network is not the same anymore. 

What is the roadmap of the company in terms of technology innovation and products?
You will see a lot of innovation coming from HPE Aruba. We have more than double the force in R&D now. The team would be delivering on the existing roadmap. The software will become more platform ready and opento the whole eco-system of partners to help us. You can also see a continued push for CloudNetworking, managing with Aruba Central product, the network from the Cloud etc will continue on and a lot of investment to stimulate that. 

Network is an infrastructure for infrastructure

Prof. SadaGopan, Director, IIIT said, “The PC came as a slave to a master called Mainframe Computers. People discovered new ways of doing it and a company called Adobe comes and Desktop publishing happened. HP would not have sold laser printers if there was no desktop publishing. Everything happens on desktops. A lot of things got changed and that is precisely what the mobile phone is doing. 

For long we had a nice computing, it was important, but today far more important is data- big data, analytics etc. It is one thing for us to build the network but today our children do not care because they expect the network to run 24/7, efficiently and in a predictably manageable way.  

Our children are born in the wireless world. The good thing about Aruba is it started in wireless space and is able to manage this world. The ability to run and manage a network is important. Today network is an infrastructure of the infrastructure.”