Aruba’s NaaS solution empowers its partners to help customers adopt seamless user experience from the edge to the cloud

In a chat with VARINDIA, Jabez Selwyn, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Group, Redington India discusses about Aruba’s ESP solution, of how it is helpful for network modernisation,  empowering partners and much more -

How Aruba is empowering partners by offering Network-as-a-Service?  

To start with three things, one, hybrid is here to stay, second, the customer experience needs to be seamless across campus, remote, IoT and data center networks and third is security, a CEO must be at peace against any vulnerability.

For example, a couple of years back we had to enter the office and login. The network architecture supported the offices but not the remote logins. They were simply not designed for new ways of work. Not many of us were familiar with video calls before 2020. Network update mail was sent a week prior and it would be done on a Sunday. If something goes wrong the next day, it would be a holiday for the employees. It affected productivity and agility, in short adapting yesterday’s network to today’s needs is now almost impossible. Aruba empowers partners to help solve this problem for their customers in the most agile manner with easier network management. Today, our partners for Aruba NaaS can complete implementation in a matter of a few days. It empowers the partners to help their customers adopt a seamless consistent user experience from the edge to the cloud.

Another problem that our partners face is their customer’s budget for the project. How much to invest? Scalability can never be predicted precisely. What if the customer invests heavily on a technology and it becomes redundant or obsolete in two years? So, how does the customer optimize their capital during an expensive digital journey? Also, the decision making takes a long time due to such budget constraints. Here, Aruba empowers the partners to pitch in a solution with a shorter sales cycle, a scalable pay as a service and secure network completely.

How is the Aruba ESP Solution useful for Network Modernisation?

Aruba ESP’s AI powered automation is unique. Today’s biggest challenge for any organization is talent for digital transformation. The customers are facing talent crunch across industry sectors and automation is the only way. Aruba’s automation advantage is the AIOps. It is based on data lake from over 1,00,000 customers and is ever increasing. This is a human assisting technology which effectively eliminates the need of humans to do repetitive jobs like network management and troubleshooting. AIOps helps to reduce ticketing by over 50% and resolve issues 90% faster. So our partners can deliver this as a huge cost saver for their customers.  Another key aspect is the predictive analytics of Aruba’s ESP which has upto 95% accuracy.

With ESP the customers get to manage their switches, access points, gateway from a single pane of glass and the visibility of the network is always available everywhere.

Currently, Redington has ESP demo labs in four cities - Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai. These labs are created to have user level experience for our channel partner and customers where they can feel the device.

How Aruba is adding value in helping the partners to address the new IT challenges?

Aruba Instant On delivers new technology for the newer challenges. Post pandemic wireless connectivity became a show stopper for many organizations. Instant On is a product that takes the challenge of being instantly configurable and can be done by anyone thus eliminating the need for our partners to spend on deployment.

How are you empowering the partners and VARs with HPE GreenLake - Everything/Infrastructure-as-a-Services?

With Greenlake’s Aruba Central one can have a complete view and monitoring can be done from a single pane of glass. Also, the built-in foundation for zero trust and SASE frameworks helps the partner to have an edge over competition to deliver a completely secure environment from day zero.

Our focus in terms of positioning of Greenlake for all customers is Aruba Central – its interface plays a vital role in integrating the compute and networking part of HPE’s complete Greenlake solution and it empowers the IT managers to upscale, right scale with this interface along with other cloud services in quick time. This eliminates additional inventory or capacity that is not utilized in an instant. Thus the partners are able to provide true ROI value to their customers.

How is Redington protecting partners in this growing competition in the industry?

One of the key advantages Redington delivers to the channel partner is its strong 100 member pre-sales team and implementation of services across technologies in the enterprise space. We make it available to partners across India and they can leverage this to upsell, cross sell and thereby bringing in incremental revenue for the partners. For example, a server storage partner can leverage our capabilities of pre-sales and post-sales team of Aruba to increase their customer base. This team works closely with our partners to address their customer requirements starting from a site survey, network audit, heat map analysis and network orchestration. We also help in implementation of these solutions through our post-sales team.