Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 29 | Page 20

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. 20