Security and enhancing the mobility experience – the key focus areas for Aruba

Aruba is a wireless networking subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. India being a strategic market, the big India team that consists of both employees and partners are working together to promote the Aruba brand in the market and that is helping the company to win more customers and penetrate into newer cities.

Throwing more light on this, Santanu Ghose, Director – India, Aruba (a HPE Company) also speaks about how the company is bullish about wi-fi & security and how it is working towards bettering the experience 

As the entire India gets connected, the key focus segment for HPE Aruba remains to be mobility. Wi-fi is becoming a lifeline of the Generation Y and this is what Aruba continues to focus on by improving the technology year over year. 

“We are improving the technology year over year. We have just released our Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) version of products and this is going to be a much more deterministic technology for connecting various things. The usage will definitely grow,” says Santanu Ghose, Director – India, Aruba (a HPE Company).

India is adopting Wi-Fi in a very big way. Especially in public infrastructure, rural Wi-Fi and urban Wi-Fi hotspots are getting created, which have the capability to run 24x7x365, which Shantanu calls it non-stop Wi-Fi. 

“That is definitely a characteristic Aruba has,” he says. “We can do online upgrades without disrupting the network. So that's a great example of a continual service that we are bringing. So the key USP of the Aruba brand is having robust Wi-Fi devices, which can run 24x7x365 days and they are non-stop,” he explains.

Aruba is also doing something beyond Wi-Fi; it is looking at security in a very different way. It understands that if the user is connecting multiple devices and gadgets through Wi-Fi, he needs to secure them. Aruba therefore is focusing on security big time; it is not only securing the perimeter but is also doing Network Access Control (NAC), User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) with Aruba IntroSpect. Aruba is also looking at how to ensure continual usage experience without disruption. And for that it bought a company called Cape Networks and is creating an offering called Service Assurance. 

“In Service Assurance, we are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand how the network is actually behaving from a user application perspective, so that customers have a better experience and face no disruptions. We can actually predict if there are going to be any issues in the network and fix that even before the problem hits it or can pinpoint where the problem is and do a root cause analysis to fix the issues quickly. So Service Assurance using AI and ML is our big focal area,” Says Santanu.

But Aruba differentiates from the rest of the security vendors in a way that it has a 360 degree offering. Besides having its own products, Aruba also collaborates with other security products. Additionally, Aruba considers itself a multi-vendor company, because from a security aspect it just does not secure its devices, but it does it for multiple vendors and is truly neutral about it. 

Security and enhancing the mobility experience are therefore the two important areas for Aruba at present.

India – an important market for Aruba

India is the fastest growing market with its GDP growing faster than anywhere in the world. And so it happens to be a strategic market for Aruba too.

“The country also throws up a lot of talent; a lot of our R&D activities are done out of India. We have about a large team of R&D working here in India between Bangalore and Chennai. So India is a key contributor to the Aruba business and Aruba technology initiatives. A lot of patents also get generated out of here. We also have plans now to start a manufacturing here in India, apart from the R&D that we have here,” says Santanu. 

There are a lot of other things that Aruba does in India from an innovation perspective. The worldwide team is very focused on the India market. It is also looking to contributing to the society by building some very critical networks and taking up key technology initiatives with some large hospitals, educational institutes, public networks, etc. “So, I see a lot of contribution, and a lot of support coming from the worldwide management of Aruba over to India,” asserts Santanu. 

Going forward

Sums up Shantanu, “We have to grow our share. We are building some of the largest networks today and the most critical networks are with us. One is the GST network that is run by us. Another one is the WAN network of the Department of Post, which is actually on our routers. Besides we have a lot of endorsements coming from a lot of customers. We are spreading our network in the SMB and the unattended SMB. We are moving to tier II, tier III cities through the partner network and expanding fast.”

Shantanu also believes that Aruba will the market leader very soon in the SMB space as it is growing very fast in this space. This is because they don't have legacy networks to take care of and so they are adopting Aruba’s technology even faster.