COVID-19’s disruption of traditional business models has made way for long overdue business operational changes. Depleted revenues along with the burden of growing fixed cost during Covid, induced lockdowns and eroded margins. With these tough conditions, organizations required working capital to keep the lights on.
In response to these adverse conditions, businesses increasingly adopted technology and an asset-light model to navigate these market challenges. Network as a Service (NaaS) addresses this by using the Operating Expense (OPEX) in a pay-per-use manner and by transferring technology, people, and processes to a vendor/partner that is a specialist in its respective field.
NaaS allows companies to focus on its core business and maximize profits and shareholder value. The company can also move from a fixed to a variable cost structure. Analysis shows asset-light companies have outperformed their peers on total shareholder return over the last five years.
Drivers, Challenges and Solutions for Executing an Asset-light Strategy
In February 2021, Ernst & Young LLP conducted an asset-light strategy webcast poll with response from more than one thousand C-suite executives. Fifty six percent of respondents agreed that digitization and innovation are key drivers for considering an asset-light strategy. However, many reported that finding the right partner is the biggest challenge in executing the asset-light strategy.
Having a world-class network is the cornerstone for any successful digital strategy, and companies are looking for a partner that can provide a complete network solution (hardware, security, software, services) to help simplify operations, optimize resources, realize network and security convergence, and improve the user experience.
Responding to this market need, technology vendors such as HPE have introduced innovative solutions with NaaS that deliver high-performance, end-to-end network solutions in a simple monthly payment model and with no upfront capital expenditure. HPE GreenLake for Networking, a NaaS offering, is an asset-light model that enables businesses to become agile by allowing them to focus on their core competencies and scale quickly.
Today there is a heightened demand for different types of network consumption. To embrace an asset-lite strategy, companies must consider new ways of paying for and operating their networks and provide flexibility in how customers consume their services. NaaS can help rapidly deploy and manage them in a more elastic way.
To learn more about NaaS and HPE GreenLake for Networking, go to www.arubanetworks.com/naas.
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