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Aruba Strengthens Collaboration with Brocade in the Middle East with Joint Local Initiatives
Published Nov 19, 2014
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Aruba Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: ARUN), a leading provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise, has announced that it is building upon its global strategic alliance with Brocade that was announced in September last year, and strengthening the collaboration in the Middle East with local initiatives aimed at enabling select channel partners to deliver an integrated and unparalleled wired and wireless solution based on best-of-breed products from the two networking vendors.
Mr. Bashar Bashaireh, Regional Director, Gulf and Pakistan at Aruba Networks Middle East says, “The Middle East is seeing a convergence of the wired and wireless worlds where customers expect a seamless and secure experience irrespective of what device they are using or from where they connect to the enterprise network. The mobility-centric approach from Aruba and Brocade will help organizations to deliver this end-user experience - enabling improved performance, simplified management and security policy, while lowering total ownership costs for enterprise IT.”
In order to educate regional enterprises about how the end-to-end solution will help them create next-generation data centre networks, Aruba and Brocade will be organizing customer events in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha and Cairo within the next six months. Historically both companies have experienced a great deal of success in verticals such as government, hospitality, education, healthcare and banking and finance, and these will be the sectors that they will focus their initial efforts on.
The shift to enterprise mobility breaks legacy three-tier network architectures with an overlay wireless tier. As a result, IT departments are struggling to provide differentiated experiences and security for an ever increasingly mobile user community and its growing number of devices and applications. To address these customer pain points, Brocade and Aruba are pairing the scalable and simplified network operation of Brocade® HyperEdge™ architecture with the rich context of user, device, application and location information inherent in the Aruba Mobility-Defined NetworksTM architecture to deliver secure mobile user experiences for customers. The result is a simplified, mobility-centric campus network solution that operates with context-based access and policy management for every user, regardless of how they connect. Brocade HyperEdge architecture cuts wired infrastructure TCO more than 50% over Cisco. Aruba’s solution reduces operational workload while easily on-boarding, securing, monitoring, and optimizing BYOD and Aruba AirWave together with Brocade Network Advisor provides centralized datacenter to wireless edge management.
Osama AlHaj-Issa, Channel Director, Middle East & Turkey at Aruba Networks says, “Boosting local ties gives existing partners from both companies the chance to develop new capabilities and business opportunities. For Aruba partners, the integration of Brocade into their portfolio gives them an on-ramp to datacentre opportunities and for Brocade partners, the addition of Aruba gives them an inroad into Mobility and BYOD market which is becoming an increasing trend in the region.”
Brocade and Aruba have jointly identified ten partners in the UAE who have the technical expertise to be able to sell the integrated solution. The two vendors recently hosted a channel workshop in Dubai to educate these partners about their collaborative technologies and the various market opportunities that they could tap into in order to create incremental revenue streams. Partners will also be entitled to discounts on training and certification programmes, will be provided with demo kits and can leverage channel incentives to drive more opportunities and profitability. During early next year, a data centre Proof of Concept (POC) lab will be built in Dubai to provide live demonstrations to customers and showcase the joint solutions. The networking vendors will be skilling up their respective technical support teams in order to be able to provide 24/7 post implementation support to customers. Brocade and Aruba will replicate the same model in other key markets across the Middle East including Saudi, Qatar and Egypt.
Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade says, “Once partners have been properly trained and certified, they will be able to deliver an open-standards based unified campus network to support secure mobility, the proliferation of mobile devices within campus environments, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives and emerging technologies, such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The integrated solution will enable customers to eliminate vendor lock-in and reduce total cost of ownership by nearly half as compared to equivalent offerings, which is a very strong value proposition.”
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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