Ahmed El Sayed, Channel lead – Middle East & Africa at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company speaks to Channel Post MEA about how the company is ramping up its cloud initiatives and driving growth through channel partners.
Cloud computing is on the rise in the Middle East & Africa region. What is Aruba doing to help partners take advantage of the opportunities in this area?
All our partner programs have been devised to help our partners play an integral role and drive business transformation as customers embrace the Cloud. Our compensation schemes for our partners are significantly larger than any traditional kind of compensation so they can benefit the most and contribute directly to their revenue stream. It also allows them to have access to customers across all verticals and multi-million dollar opportunities where they can play that role. Cloud transformation is a fast-growing market and represents a tremendous opportunity in the Middle East and Africa region for our partners as they can have the dedicated support of the Aruba field team, be it sales or pre-sales, where they can help them and work with them shoulder- to-shoulder to drive such conversations with our customers.
We have also created a platform where our partners can deliver the best cloud experience to their customers and create annual recurrent revenues, so that these partners can grow and expand beyond just offering a networking as a service.
What are the barriers when it comes to cloud adoption?
Agility is the biggest obstacle for our customers who are aiming to transform their cloud management solutions. Automation also remains a constant challenge and we’re trying to help our customers with the way data is being consumed, analysed, and built.
With the emergence of the hybrid workplace and the Internet of Things (IoT), IT teams are under tremendous pressure with the growing number of connected apps and devices. We know by now that the network in these cases must support more distributed users over multiple remote locations without compromising on security, at the same time.
Can you elaborate about Aruba’s technological prowess when it comes to cloud networking.
For organizations today, automation, a reliable network, and a great user experience can make the difference between keeping employees and guests, or battling it out for skilled talent and market share. Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) with Aruba Central cloud helps fast-track new hybrid workplace, IoT and work-from-home services that can make a difference.
October last year saw the launch of the company’s Enterprise Cloud instance in UAE. The new deployment is in response to the increasing appetite of enterprises in the country for cloud-based networking that provides resilience, efficiency, automation and flexibility of business. The Cloud instance will provide in-country data residency and enable local enterprises to maintain proximity to their data. Aruba Central will be hosted on the local Cloud instance.
Aruba Central is an integral part of our Edge services platform and it’s a frame to our end-to end Edge-to-Cloud networking solution. It’s a unified platform that can manage wired, wireless and SD WAN networking solution, but then it gets even more interesting. Aruba Central is also powered by machine learning and AI, which means that it’s 100% automated, and can cater to all types and sizes of customers’ demands. This means that it can be deployed on-prem and on public cloud as well. Aruba Central can also be deployed over a managed services platform.
How is Aruba helping customers embrace the cloud as part of their digital transformation initiatives?
Aruba is committed to helping advance our enterprise customers’ cloud transformation journey with a comprehensive Edge-to-Cloud networking solution through a single pane of glass. We provide an easier way to extend their network from edge-to-cloud – all enabled by a seamless, unified wired, wireless, and SD-Branch infrastructure. Leveraging Cloud technologies enables us to deliver solutions that use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at scale, resulting in what we call Aruba Self-healing AIOps. The benefit for customers is that problems are automatically surfaced and fixed before end-users or business performance are impacted, without requiring any manual effort on behalf of IT operators.
In addition, the agility and flexibility of implementation and the means of delivering this to our customers also can be provided as a managed services where our channel partners play an integral role in helping driving that customer experience.
Our core value of customer-first, customer-last, is the main driver for all our innovations in Aruba, and is powered by the three pillars of security, connectivity and analytics. Our ultimate objective is to allow our customers a seamless user experience that can be managed independently, without a manual intervention or compromise on security.
What can partners look forward to from Aruba this new year?
The last year has been a year of consolidation and growth for us and our channel ecosystem. We look forward to an exciting year ahead with various channel and end-user initiatives planned.
We’ve always had an extremely solid strategy for the channel community. For 2023, our biggest objective is to make sure we truly implement the customer-first, customer-last principle and enhance our customers’ experiences.
We also strive to empower our channel partners through programs solutions, constant innovations and team engagements, to be able to scale on enterprise. There has also been significant investment within the region on scaling on the SMB space right through the Aruba portfolio, which is constantly growing and expanding.
We are a very fast-growing company right and while we’re steadily gaining market share, we’re also increasing our customer portfolio and working closely with our partners to deepen their footprint.
