Solution providers with few networking vendors often aren’t in demand.
However, specialty distributor Westcon Group</font? is about to come knocking on their doors after being chosen by Aruba Networks Inc., a four-year old wireless networking startup, to carry its products throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“Aruba’s hope is they can engage very tightly with the reseller and be one of the top five vendors,” said Laurie Usewicz, Westcon’s vice-president and general manager of its security practice.
Until now Aruba has been servicing its partners directly from its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters.
An Aruba spokesperson couldn’t be reached for comment on the deal, announced this week, but Usewicz said “they are very excited about Westcon in Canada in leveraging the relationships we have in the reseller community.”
Aruba was started in 2002 to create enterprise wireless solutions, with customer shipments beginning a year later.
Former Nortel Networks president Dominic Orr, who had been Aruba’s chairman, was named president and CEO last year of the company, which began trading in March on the Nasdaq.
It has scheduled a third quarter earnings call for Thursday, its first since going public.
Products include a line of wireless LAN Mobility Controllers powered by the ArubaOS, which scale from branch offices to corporate headquarters, as well as indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi access points.
Combined with Aruba’s Mobility Management System, a suite of applications for planning, monitoring, fault management, reporting, RF coverage and location visualization, the system is said to seamlessly integrate with corporate virtual private networks.
Earlier this month Aruba announced its Secure Enterprise Mesh technology that it said enable a converged data, voice, and video network to be deployed or expanded without installing any new data wiring.
Through technology partnerships with companies such as Avaya, Juniper Networks and others Aruba says it can offer solutions that also cover voice over WLAN and security.
Last week Aruba announced a Solutions Partner Program, a two-level program for validating the compatibility and interoperability of partner products with Aruba’ solutions.
Compatible partners have conducted a thorough testing of their products ability to interoperate with Aruba’s products. Certified partners’ products have also undergone deep interoperability testing at Aruba’s laboratories.
In fact, said Usewicz, Avaya channel partners are among those that Aruba prefers to team up with.
Because Westcon focuses on mobility, convergence and security, Aruba fits many of its customer segments,” she said.
The distributor will be e-mailing Webinar invitations to its channel partners here so they can learn more about Aruba, and sales staff will follow up with one-on-one meetings with selected VARs to go deeper into the company. Westcon will then introduce Aruba executives to resellers it thinks will be a good match.
VARs should take a shine to Aruba, said Usewicz. “Aruba offers a very sound solution . .“It’s known on the wireless side, but you’ll see in the short term make some additional announcements on their remote access products and VPN wireless products that have a great play in the home office.”
“Although they’re not as well known as some of the larger manufacturers,” she said, “given the opportunity, if an end user evaluates their products they certainly will win on their technology.”
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