Aruba As-A-Service ‘Setting The Bar’ For The IT Industry: HPE’s Antonio Neri

‘HPE’s GreenLake is key to customers’ transformation efforts. We are strides ahead of our competitors. They are unable to match the breadth and depth of our edge-to-cloud portfolio,’ HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri said at Aruba Atmosphere 2021.

Businesses, especially in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, are keeping budgets top of mind. The IT as-a-service model, or being able to more flexibly buy and consume technology, is only increasing in popularity.

In fact, the as-a-service model is becoming “the norm” in how customers want to consume technology, according to Aruba Networks founder and President Keerti Melkote. ”Having partners … taking all the technology, bringing it together, [and] ultimately delivering business outcome for them. Your service model is where the market is doing,” he told solution providers and customers at Aruba Atmosphere 2021.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise-owned Aruba Networks is no stranger to consumption-based IT. The networking specialist has spent the past couple of years integrating its portfolio into the HPE stack for a simpler IT offering that can be served up as a service to customers by channel partners.

[Related: Aruba ESP, Now With Silver Peak, Has Cisco In Its Crosshairs]

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri said the company‘s edge-to-cloud Platform-as-a-Service strategy is “setting the bar” for the rest of the industry. That’s because HPE GreenLake, its consumption-based IT offering, spans all aspects of networking, storage and compute.

“HPE’s GreenLake is key to customers’ transformation efforts. We are strides ahead of our competitors. They are unable to match the breadth and depth of our edge-to-cloud portfolio,” Neri said at Aruba Atmosphere. “We provide a true as-a-service experience that lets you focus on the innovation and outcomes you need to drive your business, not the underlying infrastructure.”

Customers are increasingly telling Aruba that they want more financial flexibility around their IT strategies, either by procuring Software as a Service, or buying the entire network as a managed service and evolving into a consumption-based, or pay-as-you go model, over time, Melkote said. “Underpinning all of this, of course, is delivering that operationalization of budget [and] putting all of these different service packages together into ultimately … delivering business outcomes for our customers,” he said.

India-based global solution provider and IT consultant Infosys, which partners with both HPE and Aruba Networks, is offering a managed service to Siemens Gamesa, the company’s renewable energy arm. Infosys is helping Siemens Gamesa with a massive wind turbine farm in Europe, said Infosys President Ravi Kumar.

“Wind power is very uniquely edge,” Kumar said, adding that company was looking to transform its business and build an agile IT environment. Infosys built out an “edge-to-cloud” connectivity solution and end-user access to both the Siemens and Gamesa applications to bring them together in a unified manner, he said.

The project has IoT devices —in this case, wind turbines—being added to the wired and wireless networks on a constant basis. The deployment flexibility that Aruba offers fit the bill for Siemens Gamesa, Kumar said.

“Enterprises want to focus the human capital [and] financial capital on the core and take the non-core and give it away to providers who can give them as-a-service,” he said.

Aruba parent HPE in 2019 announced its plan to offer its entire portfolio as a service by 2022, which will involve scaling HPE to reach new market segments and use cases, the company said. HPE said GreenLake is its fastest-growing business.

Aruba, for its part, revealed in March that it increased rebate incentives for the Aruba Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offering as part of the GreenLake for Aruba offering. The Aruba partner program also is providing partners an opportunity to generate monthly recurring revenue over the life of the NaaS contract, Aruba Vice President of Worldwide Channels Donna Grothjan told CRN.