Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, today announced new network procurement and consumption models to give enterprise customers more flexibility and choice in how they obtain and support their network infrastructure.

The rapid introduction of mobile technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) have accelerated the requirements for IT network infrastructures. With refresh cycles measured in months instead of years, networks need to enable a new set of end user and line-of-business facing digital services requiring IT organisations to efficiently adapt and deliver enterprise grade security at the highest levels of reliability.

To remove unpredictability in IT operations and spending, Aruba is taking a software-based approach with its Mobile First Platform, enabling IT organisations to quickly respond to new requirements as they emerge, minimise capital expenditures, and maintain a competitive edge. Customers benefit from customised options for obtaining and managing their networks with Aruba’s portfolio of programmable IT networking products for Wi-Fi, BLE, wired and wide area network (WAN) connectivity, and consulting, support and technology services from its key partners.

New Network Infrastructure Procurement and Consumption Models

The Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) market, comprised of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud-managed WLAN, is expected to grow significantly. IDC estimates that the global enterprise SDN market will grow to $8.7 billion and the global cloud-managed WLAN market is forecasted to reach $2.5B by 2018. With major trends like increased automation, data analytics, IoT and a renewed emphasis on security affecting IT infrastructure plans, many organisations are trying to minimise workload on IT staff and shift spend from large capital to predictable operational expenses.

“The cloud paradigm has driven an expectation of being able to buy technology as a service on an as-needed basis,” said Pieter Engelbrecht Business Unit Manager Sub-Sahara Africa, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “Network-as-a-Service addresses this market shift with a fundamentally new way to acquire and consume communications services. Starting with an initial group of partners today, we will be expanding our breadth of subscription offerings to make them available to an increasingly broad base of customers.”

In collaboration with HPE Financial Services, HPE Technology Services and leading partners, including Accenture and Deloitte, organisations can dynamically react to changing needs by leveraging an OpEx-based NaaS model. This model allows organisations to immediately adopt the most modern network infrastructure, designed for new business applications, with secure connectivity for IoT and improved user experiences via actionable, real-time insights.

Key benefits for enterprise customers include:

-          Better utilisation of technology and resources - With a NaaS model, enterprises can deploy and capitalise on the latest technology without burdening internal IT resources with additional training or tasks allowing them to focus on business priorities.

-          Ability to slash costs by moving to an operational expense model - Enterprises can reduce capital expenditures to simplify their budget process and better predict and manage network acquisition, administration and operational costs.

-          Improved management of network scalability, flexibility and technology cycles - With the network functioning like a utility, organisations can scale their network as it grows and easily add new services like BYOD, IoT, security, location-based services and proactive management.

Enabling Channel Partners with the Power of Cloud-based Managed Services

Wireless LAN, wired switching and WAN routing infrastructures can now be managed for customers by resellers and service providers using Aruba Central, a subscription-based network services solution hosted in the public cloud, expanding the reach of cloud networking to many different customer scenarios. Aruba Central enables Aruba resellers to take advantage of Central’s support for multi-tenancy and its built-in managed services portal, and start offering managed services to their customer base. With a turnkey solution and no additional platform engineering cost or complexity, Aruba Central delivers a recurring revenue stream with higher margin opportunities for Aruba resellers.

Aruba channel partners, Aruba customers with varying levels of IT infrastructure administration across many distributed sites can take advantage of the platform – with different groups within IT having different privileges of access to the platform, defined per location.