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TALKPOINT
EXPERIENCE AT THE EDGE Sherifa Hady, Channel Sales Director, EMEA, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company discusses the company’s focus in enabling the experience at the edge What is the role that Aruba plays in digital transformation initiatives that are underway at most companies? Enterprise and SMB segment companies have indeed gone through some kind of digital transformation in terms of how IT can help their business outcomes, and not just be a cost centre. Our strategy revolves around 4 aspects- connect, protect, analyze and act. Connectivity in terms of hardware is at the root of what we do in terms of our networking solutions. With more and more devices connected outside of the datacenter, there is a need for better security, which is the second aspect of our focus. Hence, we are going to see more and more security being embedded into products. In future, every product will have security embedded. With more and more devices connected, we need to enable for customers a preemptive way in which they can look at connectivity bottlenecks and improve from the perspective of future risks, look at security issues to resolve them etc. The next is to act on the analysis so that the business doesn’t have to bear the impact of these issues. We have software management tools to analyze aspects like high bandwidth, low bandwidth zones or users etc so that IT managers can look how to rearrange. How are you focused on enabling partners? What are their pain points and how shoukd they be evolving? Customers first and customers last is the basis of our got to market strategy. Customer requirements these days are very different from earlier years when the reseller could just sell them the products and enjoy the margins. We are going to see less and less of that model and more and more of the services model in this decade. SMARTSMB / April 2020
— By Diksha Vohra
Sherifa Hady
Channel Sales Director, EMEA, Aruba
There will be requirements for partners to provide a whole new set of services to customers. The requirements could be more around consumption models of using IT. Some of the customers may come up with the requirements that they do not want to incur costs on product purchases and training costs and they would rather want the partners to come in and give these as services. So rather than look at outright costs, they will want hardware as
a service, software as a service, networking as a service etc. Our partners are obviously going through a transformation themselves. We are enabling them through trainings and resources. We do see a lot of companies that are heading in that direction. We see a lot of partners providing those services. Other entities, for instance the Telcos that weren’t neces-
