Aruba Networks founder and president Keerti Melkote told the assembled throngs at Aruba Atmosphere in Las Vegas that partners who have been given a good kicking from the move to the cloud are seeing a new opportunity for cloud-based profits.
Melkote said that there had been a timeline in the networking trends biz from centralised with the mainframe from 1960 to 1970, distributed with client-server from 1980 to 2000, centralised with mobile and cloud starting in 2005 and distributed with edge intelligence beginning in 2020.
The market’s next step is a return to the edge, where the client-server architecture needs to be reimagined in the context of the Internet of Things, where devices, like self-driving cars, function in constrained environments lacking elastic compute and storage.
Melkote said that the investments that everybody is making in Silicon Valley and beyond is going into building this next-generation architecture that is edge-centric. “And the edge and the cloud are going to be cooperating and working together to enable this next level of intelligence in our infrastructure.”
But while this may present solution providers opportunity, Melkote stressed they would also need technical skills to integrate services to solve customer’s business problems, as well as expertise in edge computing, security and software.
Over the next year Aruba will look to evolve from a provider of wireless networking to a more holistic provider of edge infrastructure – wireless, wired, compute and storage delivered through software-defined architectures. This will be combined with more software and services-centric approach, as opposed to hardware.
Aruba worldwide channel chief Donna Grothjan is retiring after 30 years.
