Currently, most of Aruba’s network-as-a-service (networking-as-a-service (NaaS)) customers are large, multinational organizations. But the vendor aims to reach a broader market by offering unified network management and assessing the single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) approach, Executive VP and GM of Aruba/ HPE Intelligent Edge Phil Mottram told SDxCentral.

Mottram touted that Aruba is leading the NaaS market with competitors slowly catching up. Initially, he assumed customers would look to change the commercial model through NaaS which is essentially a delivery model for networking products based on on-demand usage and a consumption-based billing mode; but actually, most of the customers said they are more interested in the management service that can reduce the network managing pressure and address the talent shortage issues.

With that main learning point, Aruba now targets the mid-size and smaller Enterprise market.

“We've done about 30 large contracts,” Mottram said. “What I'm trying to do is generate these repeatable offers so that we can move from just selling to the part of the market that's these big multinationals and then start to drop down to a broader market that just wants to buy one solution and have it all managed by one partner.”

In the SASE space specifically, Mottram also saw the vendor consolidation trend. “That change in the market is probably two to three years out,” he said. “I think some smaller customers may be interested in buying the entire SASE solution from one player.”

Gartner also highlighted this trend in a recent report. The analysis firm predicts 65% of enterprises will have consolidated individual SASE components into one or two explicitly partnered SASE vendors by 2025, up from 15% in 2021.

Aruba’s SASE portfolio is based on its SD-WAN platform, which it acquired for $925 million from Silver Peak. It also integrates with almost all of the major cloud security vendors, including Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Netskope, Zscaler, and Check Point.

Now, the vendor is “looking at” security to assess if it should invest more in this space, Mottram said. Some customers prefer “mix and match” their SD-WAN and security services edge (SSE) vendors, but “you're also going to have  smaller organizations that may say: You know what, I just want one solution from one vendor that takes care of all of these aspects.”

“What we do is we look at our portfolio and say: Okay, what would we need to do more in our portfolio? And then how should we do that? Is that M&A, is that development, etcetera? So it's just part of the market that we look at quite extensively,” he added.

Interestingly, its rival Cisco is taking the exact opposite path to expand the SASE market. Gartner recognized Cisco as one of the nine vendors that can offer a single-vendor (or unified) SASE solution. Now, the networking giant integrates with Cloudflare and Netskope SSE solutions aiming to offer the two-vendor SASE option for organizations that would like to use Cisco’s SD-WAN with a different SSE vendor.