As organizations rely more heavily on technology to deliver users faster and better ways to perform their jobs, line-of-business executives are asking IT to shift from focusing on network break/fix activities to rolling out new services, like unified communications and location-based apps. Unfortunately, the network that the business relies on won't fix itself, just yet.
During conversations with customer business and technology stakeholders, we started to hear that they want more automation and service-oriented IT tools. One customer mentioned that he never wants his IT team to sit in front of a management screen. His expectation is that an alert tells someone when something is wrong and there's also an element that describes what to fix.
The role of IT is definitely changing
Based on these discussions, we started to group management and ops features into categories so that we could better describe how Aruba technology helps IT teams make the shift. Instead of just talking about zero-touch provisioning to help speed up a deployment, the idea of grouping multiple features under a "Planning and Deployment" umbrella started to resonate.
While SNMP, CLI, and logs aren't going away soon, but market demand for greater intelligence and pinpoint visibility has led us to introduce the idea of Experience-driven Operations Management. The takeaway is that we'll start to develop features and deliver collateral that tells a better together story for our management and operations solutions, regardless of whether you're looking at on-prem (Aruba AirWave) or cloud-managed (Aruba Central) solutions.
The new model
In addition to Planning and Deployment, there are four other categories where features or solutions will be used to highlight their capabilities and value:
- Performance
- Analytics
- Security Services
- Extensibility
While we're only showing a subset of features within each category, as the content is created we'll expand on what falls into each category to solve use cases in a holistic manner. For instance, when describing how analytics help improves network performance, we'll provide insight into what can be used for wireless as well as wired use cases.
The five categories
Again, the idea is to provide you with the insight and guidance on how to better manage and operate your networks – even if they're multivendor.
