Despite all of the setbacks, the pandemic accelerated the rate of change in many ways. It has driven companies faster and farther down the digitisation path than they would have otherwise. Static networks became redundant and were no longer meeting growing business demands or supporting changing security requirements.

Adopting a modern network architecture for enterprises embarking on digital transformation initiatives and adapting to hybrid work environments became near mandatory. This created a need for seamless and secure connections for companies of all sizes to facilitate their core business functions from anywhere.

As-a-service solutions are going through a global boom coupled with the proliferation of hybrid work environments. Network services provider Aruba (also a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company) did not want to be left behind in this revolution. Their cloud-native approach helps customers meet their connectivity, security, and financial requirements across campus, branch, data centre, and remote worker environments, covering all aspects of wired, wireless LAN, and wide area networking (WAN) is now as-a-service making it one of the first few players in the network industry to do so.

We chatted with Chief Product and Technology Officer Aruba WAN Business at HPE David Hughes to learn more about what network-as-a-service means for this industry, and they will adapt to it. Hughes joined HPE after his startup Silver Peak was acquired by HPE-Aruba in 2020.

New world order

“The big next thing in networking is NaaS (Network-as-a-service). We first embarked on this journey a couple of years ago and are now leading the industry in actual deployments and learning,” said Hughes.

The networking industry is characterised by a big player dominating the market. And many consumers, after years and years of being frustrated with the slow innovation and the lock-in for services, are looking for alternatives. One of the things the folks at Aruba learnt was that businesses want a broad company that can offer everything from wired to wireless to distributed networks across offices, branches, retail outlets, via two data centres, factories, and so on.

Also read: To Voice AI or not – The changing face of customer experience

“So what we’ve done at Aruba is build out that broad portfolio that our customers have been asking for with added flexibility”, said Hughes. Aruba has one management system to manage all types of products and all types of locations. And this is a big contrast to their main competitors in the space, who offer three or four different management systems and architectures. And so it’s very frustrating for customers; they don’t understand why they need to have all these different management systems.

With this centralised management, Aruba also wishes to acquire market share in data centres to add to its dominance in campus and distributed enterprises.

The importance of CX

With this integrated one-stop-shop approach, customer service is much more prominent as it’s all about the service now. “I think it’s really at the forefront. “That’s how modern consumers judge consumer products, and enterprises are no different now,” said Hughes.

One of the important things Aruba always include is a technology they call user experience insights. It allows them to put probes, either hardware or software, that measures the user experience as the client engages with all the apps that are important to them. They use this to check and ensure they are meeting the objective of the service.

Over the next year or two, network and allied services will become increasingly central as people kind of undergo the shift of thinking about the network as a whole set of devices that they own and operate to kind of activity as a service. And it may be that they want to do it themselves and offer that service. So it may be that they want to outsource it. But either way, they need to shift; there has to be a shift to thinking of this as a service. And NaaS is all about measuring that end-user experience and using that to drive everything else.

With NaaS, the responsibility for more excellent customer experience is much higher now, especially for the technology providers. Earlier, they were a lot more detached from the customer. “I feel like the focus for CX in this industry, almost like what it did to SaaS as well, we saw people being extremely excited about just customer experience,” affirmed Hughes.

Also read: The importance of a seamless customer experience: Lessons from Amazon and Nike

NaaS also opens the doors for better network capabilities for SMEs and startups as they can now afford to work with the major service providers. “Many of the smaller businesses work with a partner they trust that ultimately uses our foundational network so that they can pay the partner monthly. Users can now access bespoke value-added services whilst continuing their month-on-month relationship with their partner.

As compared to SaaS, networking has a real physical element to it. And Hughes thinks that physical nature has held back people from thinking that networks could be offered as a service. And what we’re seeing is people are getting over that hump, as they realize that yes, you can have a service that involves something physical and needs to be installed.

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