Reimagining Work as We Accelerate into 2021

Keerti Melkote
President, Intelligent Edge, and Founder, Aruba Networks at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Keerti Melkote is the Founder and President of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. With a vision to enable secure mobility for enterprises of all sizes, he founded Aruba Networks in 2002 and brought...

To say that 2020 has been a challenging year for the world is a bit of an understatement. At Aruba, we’ve focused on helping our customers and partners manage and overcome these challenges, moving from business continuity in the initial days of the pandemic to delivering secure, remote work solutions and assisting with business recovery. As we approach the end of the year, we’re using the lessons learned during this time to address the next challenge – a reimagined workplace – where remote work continues to be essential, but can also include a safe return to offices, and ultimately, will enable hybrid working as our “new normal.”

A key lesson learned during the pandemic is that where we are and what we do are no longer intertwined in the same way. And while we’ve assisted and enabled our customers to manage and thrive through this transition, we’ve also embraced these changes within our own organization.

Today, Aruba’s parent company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), announced it is moving its headquarters to Houston, Texas, HPE’s largest U.S. employee site. As HPE’s Intelligent Edge business, Aruba will continue to operate its worldwide headquarters in Silicon Valley, consolidating operations into HPE’s San Jose campus, with the exception of our lab which will remain in Santa Clara.

As we move into 2021, we have the exciting opportunity to reimagine the role of the enterprise office and reshape the way our organization thinks about work. By defining a new hybrid workplace for ourselves, Aruba and HPE offices will meet the changing needs of our team members, partners and customers. We will transform offices into innovation, culture and collaboration centers that align with the future of work and the “Edge to Office” vision of flexible work we’ve rolled out across the company. Our history in pioneering innovations for the digital workplace with mobile-first, location-aware, and IoT-enabled technologies enable us to “walk the walk” at our offices by showcasing the next generation of our award-winning Aruba Smart Digital Workplace solutions to guide us safely through the post-pandemic world.

Remote team members will be fully supported with proven innovations to ensure secure connectivity for continual collaboration and productivity. As we’ve found during this unusual time, we can recreate the connected experience and camaraderie team members have previously thrived upon at physical offices in a fully digital manner.

Safety continues to be central to our vision, and just as we’ve worked with our customers to help them plan and implement return to work whether in an office, on a university campus, or at a retail store, we will plan our own team members’ return to work with safety in mind; that means following appropriate public health recommendations like physical distancing and mask-wearing, establishing protocols for cleaning, and encouraging those who can continue to work effectively from home to do so.

Ultimately, the transformation that many of us envisioned long ago to a more flexible and empowering work style, has been fast-tracked by the pandemic. This year has taught us that, rather than focusing on where we are, it’s about who we are as a company. And as a company, we continue to lead, innovate, and most importantly, deliver on our founding philosophy of “customer first, customer last”. These characteristics and principles that form our company culture will continue to drive us in the future – whether we’re in an office in Houston or San Jose, in the field or lab, or working from our homes, anywhere in the world.