At Aruba ATM Digital, the company’s virtual event, being held June 9-11, channel partners learned more about Aruba’s recently introduced Edge Services Platform (ESP). And today channel executives announced enhancements to the Aruba Partner Ready for MSP program. The coordination of the program with the ESP announcement is designed to drive more partners to sell cloud services and new consumption models.

This coordination is no accident. Aruba also expanded its MSP program back in April 2019, at its physical Aruba Atmosphere conference. That was a nod to MSPs moving to the as-a-service model.

Aruba’s Jim Harold

Aruba’s Donna Grothjan

Channel Futures met with Donna Grothjan, vice president of worldwide channels at Aruba, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise company, and Jim Harold, vice president North America channels at Aruba, to learn more about Aruba ATM Digital and how Aruba is setting the course for the latest partner opportunities.

Aruba Channel Execs

Channel Futures: What has Aruba been working on to ready partners for ESP?

Jim Harold: There are two things in particular. One is Aruba’s Cloud Expert Program – Aruba ACCE. We rolled out Aruba ACCE which is really around creating a cloud designation in the partner program. ACCE has been out for several months It was rolled out when we made major enhancements to Aruba Central 2.5, which was released earlier this year.

We put this out to get partners more engaged around Central-attach and cloud-attach with sales. We launched the program with front-end discounts and back-end benefits. The big thing was around enablement support. That includes free sales and technical training, among other things. The program also includes go-to-market support such as demand gen to help partners sell more cloud solutions.

We have about 800 folks who have gone through the certifications.

So, leading up to ESP getting partners more engaged with Aruba Central which is our platform of the future and core to the ESP announcement.

CF: There’s more for partners, right?

JH: What we’re announcing at ATM on June 15 is our enhanced Aruba Partner Ready for MSP Program. We’ve had an MSP program for a couple of years now. One enhancement, based on feedback, is a flat discount to make it easier for partners. So, we streamlined the pricing to make it attractive.

The second thing we did was offer flexible financing. One of the big benefits of being part of HPE is the financial services. We’re also enhancing the enablement training that we’re doing, technical support and services, and more support around go-to-market.

So those are the two things leading up to the ESP announcement and overall through ATM.

It’s About Partner Choice

CF: Tell us more about partners stepping up to the plate for ESP.

Donna Grothjan: Another thing is our partner strategy relates to launch of the Edge Services Platform. Because it’s designed to deliver a cloud experience at the edge, it can be consumed as a service in the cloud or it can be consumed on-prem. We want to ensure that there’s partner choice. That’s because their customers will want to consume it in a particular way, so we want to offer choice.

We’re very focused on enabling the partners to represent themselves. Especially their own brand in the market. We want to ensure partners that we have the ability to support them in any way they want to consume it.

Whether they’re a solution provider and they have a resell business, a managed services business or they want to offer a full NaaS offer managed by Aruba, we give them those options.

There’s Partner Ready for Networking, Partner Ready for MSP and GreenLake for Aruba.

In every opportunity we look to our partners to provide the services. So, any option still requires services such as assessments, configuration, installation, to wrap around any of those offering. So, we’re very partner-focused when it comes to services.

HPE Financial Services can convert any opportunity to an OPEX plan. But with GreenLake for Aruba is integrated into the overall offering.