As more networking vendors dip their toes in network-as-a-service (NaaS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Aruba touted its earlier start and broader portfolio than its competitors such as Cisco.

NaaS is essentially a delivery model for networking products. It typically includes on-demand usage, a consumption-based billing model, self-service capabilities, and elements such as network routers, switches, gateways, and firewalls.

“It's really all about giving customers the ability to buy as-a-service, to buy an outcome versus the traditional way of selling networks [where] you're buying devices,” David Hughes, chief technology and product officer at Aruba, told SDxCentral in an interview.

And Aruba’s NaaS portfolio “encompasses everything that we're doing,” he said. “We have customers who we run their entire stores — all the wired and wireless switching and the WAN connectivity — we're responsible for everything.”

The portfolio started with Aruba’s biggest customers including retailers with thousands of stores, financial institutions, and companies with global presence. Additionally, the vendor offers the NaaS service in more than 50 countries, but “most of the competing solutions are usually available in a very small number of countries,” Hughes claims.

Dubbed GreenLake for Aruba, the service represents the networking arm of HPE’s broader GreenLake portfolio and integrates with the full swath of GreenLake services.

“We're bringing it all together so that customers can actually buy any combination of compute and networking and storage as a service and then manage that through one account, one one way of paying, one relationship,” Hughes said. “We see the market shifting in that direction, not just for cloud but also for things can be consumed on the edge and in the data center.”

Aruba Claims Broader NaaS Portfolio Than Cisco

The biggest advantage for Aruba NaaS offerings is “we're not limiting the NaaS offering to just a couple of pieces of our portfolios, so we have a much broader set of things that come under the NaaS umbrella,” Hughes touted in reference to rival Cisco. Plus, Aruba started its NaaS journey earlier than many of its competitors in November 2019.

Cisco launched its NaaS platform Cisco Plus last March, which is in the early phase of the rollout and plans to initially focus on the mid-market, Raakhee Mistry, director of product marketing at Cisco, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. The company saw the need for as-a-service models around areas as cloud and security. That’s why Cisco Plus rolled out hybrid cloud and secure access service edge (SASE) as the first two major offerings at the onset, Mistry added.

Aruba Adapts to SASE Bifurcation

However, when it comes to SASE, Cisco has a headstart on Aruba, particularly when it comes to security. Plus, Cisco offers a single vendor SASE architecture, something Aruba, at least for now, does not.

Aruba's SD-WAN platform, which it acquired for $925 million from Silver Peak, does however integrate with several cloud security vendors, including Netskope, Zscaler, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare

“There's an interesting bifurcation in the market for large customers with sophisticated requirements” that they decided to go with a “two-vendor approach”: select best of breed vendors for networking and cloud security service separately, Hughes explained.

On the other hand, for most of the smaller customers, they are “making a compromise on the networking and security side in order to get everything on one package,” so, Aruba “has been investing in embedding a lot more security capabilities into our portfolio,” Hughes explained. 

Last year, Aruba extended its zero trust and microsegmentation capabilities from its SD-branch offering into its EdgeConnect platform, enabling consistent security functionality to be applied regardless of which SD-WAN technology customers deployed.

NaaS Interest Rises While Adoption Lags

Hughes believes every networking company will eventually embrace a NaaS model, and that the technology is poised for widespread adoption later this year. “I'm not sure it goes completely mainstream in 2022, but I think it will be a big part of the conversation,” he added.

Interest in NaaS is expected to rise, but adoption may take time, Sameh Boujelbene, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group, echoed in a recent report.  

“We are hearing from end-users, value-added resellers, and system integrators that they are still waiting for the right answer, offerings, or product in the market,” Boujelbene wrote in response to questions. “We also believe that some new entrants may take this as an opportunity to disrupt the market.”

Hughes concurred that the industry is still in the early shift on NaaS. “There's lots of learning to do as an industry. But it's definitely a really interesting and exciting trend and one that we want to be leading in,” he said.