HPE Aruba Leader Dishes on Acquisitions, Midmarket Opportunities

… integrated SASE platforms. But he said he expects that number to jump closer to 60% three years from now. He also pointed to the tendency of down-market customers using SASE.

“I think you’ll always have a segment of the market that will buy the separate solutions and in particular, those will be the more high-end companies with the ability to integrate, and therefore they might want to take some sort of best-of-breed. They might think one solution is better than the other,” he said. “But I think as soon as you drop out of those top customers into a broader or midmarket at that point, then they’re interested in buying an integrated solution.”

Data Center

Mottram said Aruba is expanding its data center offering. The business unit was already delivering its CX campus switches in data center environments. However, Mottram said Aruba is looking to patch in features for particular data center use cases.

He pointed to partnerships and organic growth that have helped fill gaps. On one hand, John Chambers’ Pensando, which AMD bought last year, is providing Aruba with a top-of-rack switch that enables east-west firewalling. That technology, Mottram said, saves customers money on installing an additional firewall.

On the other hand, Aruba is growing its team on the data center side.

“That we’ve been doing more recently is hiring quite a lot people to build out those capabilities for us,” Mottram said. “You’ll see us being more and more active in the data center space as we grow that business.”

NaaS Expansion

Mottram last December detailed Aruba’s efforts to drive more programmatic network-as-a-service offerings. He said the vendor previously had sold about 30 bespoke NaaS deals to large enterprise customers. However, Mottram said his team wanted to create offerings that would appeal to a broader customer base, including the midmarket. Mottram in December said Aruba had built eight NaaS SKUs that it will rely heavily on partners to sell. He told Channel Futures that three new SKUs are coming to the portfolio.

Mottram said his tenures at telecommunications providers like Vodafone, Telstra and Zayo taught him the strong opportunities that exist with midmarket customers.

“Typically the profitability was better in the midmarket. They’ve got reasonable scale. I’ve always found they’re easier to deal with because they’re more open to buying a standardized product, and that really helps your repeatability and profitability, etc. It’s actually easier to deliver because your teams are used to delivering that,” he told Channel Futures.

Mottram added that he’s seeing customer demand for NaaS differ based on verticals. He noted that construction and oil companies, for example, actually tend to prefer a one-time expenditure.

“For those sorts of companies that build large infrastructure, it’s very easy for them to get hold of capex dollars and less easy to get hold of opex,” he said. “But if you flip back the other way, retail organizations find it very difficult to get hold of capex dollars but find it easy to get hold them opex dollars.”