ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
healthcare, education, working from home,
where we know that people want what we
are calling Business Continuity.”
From the partner level, Hady and her
team are working very closely with the
wider channel.
“Partners have asked for a couple of
things. One of them is around enablement
because there are a lot of employees at home
who have more time, so they have asked for
enablement, as well as to ease the threshold,”
she said. “We’ve got various partnership
There is a saying
that says you won’t
be remembered for
what you have done
or what you have said
but you will always
be remembered for
the way you made
people feel.
levels – platinum, gold, silver, business
partner proximity – and we have said to
all partners they will maintain their level,
regardless of achieving the revenue threshold.
That’s been taken positively so far.”
The importance of strong
partnerships in times of crisis
“There is a saying that says you won’t be
remembered for what you have done or
what you have said but you will always be
remembered for the way you made people
feel,” said Hady.
“So I think the fact that we can be close
to our partners now more than ever, just to
ask them, ‘How are you feeling? How are you
doing? Do you need anything?’ goes a long
way. The partnership is not about closing
deals only, but about how we are going to
face this together. I think it’s important we
are in this together, calling up customers
and just asking them, as both Aruba and the
partner, ‘what can we do for you?’
“We are also trying to look at how we can
be ready for what is being called the ‘day
after’, which is when everything goes back to
normal – how that’s going to look and what
do we need to be ready for?”
The industry trends driving Aruba’s
channel strategy
Hady has been in her current role for five
months and, following discussions with the
management team, customers, partners
and country managers, the clear focus is
on ‘growth’.
“I really think that growth is where we
can accelerate together. And this growth, I
believe, is going to come from four areas,”
she said.
The first area is around a solution
launched last year – Aruba InstantOn.
“It’s your entry level access point which
we really believe has a huge potential. This
is the network you can use in a small office,
a home office, one branch retail outlets, and
we have seen a big uptake on this,” she said.
“That’s one big area we are focusing on and
how we can get more partners to get trained
up on these products and sell them as well.”
The second growth area – which Hady
believes is the most important one – is
bridging to everything ‘as-a-Service’.
“As you know our objective is that, by
2023, everything will be sold as-a-Service, if
required by the customer,” she said. “We are
doing a lot of things in preparation for that.
“We want our partners to be prepared
to be able to sell everything as-a-Service.
This is around the consumption models,
around customers buying Wi-Fi-as-a-Service,
Bandwidth-as-a-Service, Branches-asa-Service,
so really looking completely
differently at the way customers consume
and purchase IT.”
The final focus areas are around
verticalisation and ‘unmanaged business’.
“We are going to partners and saying, as
Aruba we have a salesforce for working on
a segment of customers, but we expect our
partners to be working on the unmanaged.
They are being more and more verticalised, so
will be working on hospitality, healthcare, IoT,
industry, manufacturing, the list goes on.”
A universal will to succeed
EMEA is a vast region spanning multiple
continents – but despite the nuances from
country to country, there is of course a
common overarching goal to succeed.
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