Tristan Rajah (Aruba)
Aruba is doubling down on its global investment and services strategy by targeting networking growth with the launch of a networking-as-a-service (NaaS) partner program in Australia.
Named NaaS: Level Up, the intent of the program is for partners to create value in their IP that is powered by the vendor's solutions, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) subsidiary said.
Partners in the program will have access to a dedicated Aruba account manager that can offer subscription pricing and training resources.
The program also aims to benefit Aruba through the increase of sales in its NaaS and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
“What we've found is that we would tend to go to [partners] and talk about this great tech that we have and then they would go away and build their services, rather than building value around it, and we trust that you're going to do it,” said Tristan Rajah, channel leader for South Pacific at Aruba.
“The problem is that most of them are under resourced and actually don't have the time and resourcing ability to create value around the product.
“So the idea behind it all is, how can we help our partners to build their IP, backed by our technology? The idea is that everything they do is going to be powered by Aruba. They build their value, they build all their services, they get extra margin out of it.”
Patrick Devlin, Aruba Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) director, said the vendor was actively working towards addressing a skills gap with product-based offerings.
“Most of the partners we deal with – they've known that this is the way to run a business forever, but most of the time the vendors haven't really caught up,” he said.
“So we're aligning with what they already know works really well. But there's still a skills gap – they know how to deliver services, but not hardware and software necessarily. We’re trying to level that up.
“Our customers are asking and we’re trying to make sure our partners are aware that we’ve got some funding available to lift their business quickly and help them build their first few as-a-service contracts, because we think that after the third or fourth one it’s really easy.”
Devlin also noted his optimism for the timing of the program launch and his outlook of the market – despite general industry mood pointing towards concern for an impending economic downturn, he sees it as a “recession-proof” industry.
“There’s more demand on networks than ever before and we can do more things in more ways than we ever have. I just don’t see the next three years slowing down for us,” he added.
“I feel there’s a lot of doom and gloom talk, but at least for the next 12 months for us it is all sunshine, happiness and rainbows.”
Earlier this year, HPE launched its SaaS-focused Partner Ready Vantage program as part of its four-year goal to shift to ‘everything’ as-a-service.
