Santanu Ghose 
Director - India
Aruba (a HPE Company)
 

Brand Positioning

Aruba is a wireless networking subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The big team at Aruba consists of both employees and partners who are working together to promote the Aruba brand in the market and that is helping the company to win more customers and penetrate into newer cities. The brand is slowly moving from tier I to tier II, tier III towns and is now present in 32 cities through an extensive channel partner network.

Aruba differentiates from the rest of the security vendors in a way that it has a 360 degree offering. Besides having its own products, Aruba also collaborates with other security products. Additionally, Aruba considers itself a multi-vendor company, because from a security aspect it just does not secure its devices, but it secures multiple vendors and is truly neutral about it.

USP of the Aruba Brand

As the entire India gets connected, the key focus segment for HPE Aruba remains to be mobility. Wi-fi is becoming a lifeline of the Generation Y and this is what Aruba continues to focus on by improving the technology year over year. It has released its Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) version of products and this is going to be a much more deterministic technology for connecting various things.

Aruba is also working beyond Wi-Fi; it is looking at security in a very different way. It understands that if the user is connecting multiple devices and gadgets through Wi-Fi, he needs to secure them. Aruba therefore is focusing on security big time; it is not only securing the perimeter but is also doing Network Access Control (NAC), User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) with Aruba IntroSpect. Aruba is also looking at how to ensure continual usage experience without disruption. And for that it bought a company called Cape Networks and is creating an offering called Service Assurance.

In Service Assurance, Aruba is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand how the network is actually behaving from a user application perspective, so that customers have a better experience and face no disruptions. It can actually predict if there are going to be any issues in the network and fix that even before the problem hits it or can pinpoint where the problem is and do a root cause analysis to fix the issues quickly. So Service Assurance using AI and ML is a big focal area.

Security and bettering the mobility network are the two important areas for Aruba at present.

India is adopting Wi-Fi in a very big way. Especially in public infrastructure, rural Wi-Fi and urban Wi-Fi hotspots are getting created, which have the capability to run 24x7x365. That is definitely a characteristic Aruba has in a way that it offers non-stop Wi-Fi. It does online upgrades without disrupting the network or any kind of downtime on the upfront. The key USP of the Aruba brand is having robust Wi-Fi devices, which can run 24x7x365 days and they are non-stop.

Security robustness is another important aspect of Aruba products. The biggest bank in India is Aruba’s customer, securing 7, 50,000 end devices. That’s a great example of the scale and robustness Aruba has on the security software. It is also managing many mission critical installations with its security software in India, some of the most critical networks of India are actually supported through its security software, which is Clear Pass, which also talks about robustness and operates for 365x24x7 without shutting down.

India – an important market for Aruba

India is the fastest growing market with its GDP growing faster than anywhere in the world. And so it happens to be a strategic market for Aruba too. The country also throws up a lot of talent; a lot of its R&D activities are done out of India. It has a big R&D team working in India between Bangalore and Chennai. Hence India is a key contributor to the Aruba business and Aruba technology initiatives. A lot of patents also get generated out of here. Besides there are also plans to start its own manufacturing plant in the country.  

There are a lot of other things that Aruba is doing in India from an innovation perspective. The worldwide team is very focused on the India market. It is also looking to contributing to the society by building some very critical networks and taking up key technology initiatives with some large hospitals, educational institutes, public networks, etc. So, a lot of support is coming from the worldwide management of Aruba over to India.