Lessons Learned from Leg 1: Aruba on Tour

As the first part of my tour has drawn to a close, I wanted to thank all the fantastic customers, partners and team members I have met so far and share some of the initial lessons I’ve learned. Throughout June and July, the very appropriately named ‘SD-VAN’ took me across Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany. I’ve put hybrid working to the test and continued to fulfil my day-to-day role, including taking conference calls and conducting meetings, from my newly fitted desk space in the van – Edge computing at its best. But alongside business as (un)usual I’ve had the very refreshing pleasure of meeting our customers, partners and team members face-to-face and discussing their journeys over the last year.

Without a doubt, I rediscovered the energy that’s derived from physical meetings. We’ve all become well accustomed to virtual meetings over the past 12+ months and there’s no question that they drive efficiency, but I was quickly reminded of the value of a hybrid approach when I came face-to-face with our people. The power and enthusiasm generated were remarkable; a testament that both virtual and physical meetings will be vital for the hybrid workplace of the future.

As well as understanding first-hand the importance of agility on the road and of in-person interactions, my trip also reiterated just how much customer conversations (and needs) have moved on during COVID. We’re no longer talking about infrastructures in isolation: the discussion has shifted towards the services that Aruba can provide as enterprises embrace the new realities of business in post-COVID environments.

Agility and flexibility in demand

The pandemic has challenged businesses in new ways, and at a pace that was previously unimaginable. Our customers have seen and experienced significant shifts across the last 12+ months which have presented new complexities around IT. For example, not only are applications and workloads distributed across the data centre and cloud, but users themselves are dispersed across campus, data centre, branch and remote locations. The network itself has also become fragmented and collectively, these complexities can risk offsetting the benefits of IoT and cloud technologies that businesses so desperately need at this time.

This has placed growing demand on IT teams, which have been under increased pressure to streamline operations and reduce complexity in this new hybrid world. As a result, our customers are looking for flexible IT options that ensure they have sustainable technologies that will enable transformation both now, and in the future. In retail, for example, the changing landscape is forcing brands to reimagine their business models – stores that have originally relied on large retail hubs and warehouses outside of city centres are now considering smaller stores in urban centres that are more digitally interactive.

These distributed environments innately create more IT complexity and there’s a clear appetite for technologies and solutions that leverage data and automation to increase agility and streamline operations.

A unified approach

Aruba is helping customers to realise this network simplification through ongoing advancements to Aruba Central and ArubaOS 10, a unified network operating system that brings together WLAN and SD-Branch capabilities. The improvements to Aruba Central, which sits at the heart of our umbrella Aruba ESP platform, include new self-healing AIOps, enhanced IoT operations, and additional security access features.

We’ve also added two new Edge switches to our CX portfolio that are purpose built to support remote offices, as well as withstanding extreme environments, which is well-suited for partners using industrial IoT applications that require always-on PoE and high-performance wired connectivity.

Resources are tighter than ever across the enterprise landscape and IT teams must have the agility and speed to manage distributed environments effectively without impacting wider operations. This was a big focus for our latest evolution and ensures our customers can redirect their precious IT resource to more business-critical areas, which is becoming even more important as traditional models dissipate.

My time on the road has shown me the very real value of optimal connectivity at the Edge and its impact on maintaining and improving operations. There’s no question that this will be fundamental to successfully operating in hybrid, digital-first environments and I’m looking forward to continuing discussions in the next part of my journey to understand how Aruba’s services can help companies deliver this.

I’m aiming to be back on the road in September – watch this space…