Enables partners to quickly evolve their ‘as-a-Service’ practice to offer customers a more flexible approach to obtaining IT solutions

 As the financial impact of COVID-19 forces many companies to reconsider their approach to pursuing digital transformation, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has launched a new program to help channel partners offer a managed service alternative to implementing IT network solutions. The Aruba Managed Services Provider Program enables partners to quickly evolve their Network as-a-Service (NaaS) practice with Aruba’s robust cloud-managed network solution for superior service and customer experience.

Available as of May 1, the program targets channel companies with an existing MSP delivery model i.e. service providers, VARs with established MSP practices, or SI’s offering managed IT services. Additional benefits include access to upfront discounts established by Aruba’s distribution partners, use of the program logo, training, enablement and Go-To-Market assistance from a dedicated team of MSP experts, a fully stocked partner resource portal, and the option to team with Aruba End User Sales.

“There is an ongoing trend in IT towards subscription-based models enabling customers to move costs from CAPEX to OPEX. With the launch of Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), our partners will be able leverage Aruba’s market leading technology to build their own solutions whilst differentiating their proposition in the market.” said Sherifa Hady, Aruba EMEA Channel Sales Director.

The program also offers flexible financing and support options via HPE’s Financial Services, which recently rolled out a number of payment relief initiatives and $2 billion in financial aid for partners and customers impacted by the pandemic.

“Many customers are looking to digital transformation to accelerate their business recovery but are finding themselves unable to get things moving due to cashflow and time constraints,” continued Sherifa. “In light of this, managed services are going to become more important than ever. In order to support this immediate need and reflect the long-term evolution of customer consumption models, resellers need to act now. We believe that together, Aruba and our partners can continue to scale our businesses for success.”

Further information about the Aruba Managed Services Provider Program can be found on Aruba’s Partner Ready Portal: https://partner.hpe.com/aruba.

Soundcore by Anker Innovations will be presenting a ‘Musical Evening by Fahmil Khan’, lead Vocalist and Guitarist of the ‘On the Rocks’ band live on Facebook on Thursday, 11^th June from 9pm onwards.

Tune in to hear a rendition of songs from the 90s, Bollywood retros, Sufi, Pop and contemporary songs to usher in the weekend.

Faraz Mehdi, Regional Sales Head at Anker Innovations MEA said, “Soundcore is committed to bringing premium audio to the people. This includes its series of Liberty true wireless earbuds, its Spirit series of sports headsets and several iconic indoor and outdoor Bluetooth speakers such as the Flare, Icon, Infini, Motion and Rave. It is the perfect companion to wind down end of the week.”

The Musical evening will be hosted on the Anker Middle East page on Facebook. Music lovers can log on https://www.facebook.com/events/558795394794813/ for the live event.

Companies to support development of IT market in UAE by helping enterprises transition to the cloud

Nutanix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced that it has signed Alpha Data, a leading solutions provider in the Middle East, as a ‘Master Reseller Partner’ in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). As part of the agreement, Alpha Data is authorized to purchase products and services from Nutanix distributors and carry out implementations of the vendor’s market-leading multi-cloud infrastructure solutions across the UAE.

Nutanix will assist Alpha Data in developing and certifying its staff to provide design, configuration and support capabilities to its customers for the entire portfolio of Nutanix solutions. Nutanix will conduct regular training and enablement sessions for online certifications, product updates and workshops for hands-on instruction. Currently the reseller has more than six engineers certified on Nutanix technology. Alpha Data technical and sales staff will have access to the various tools and resources available as part of the Nutanix Channel Charter (program). Nutanix will also make available skilled resources to assist the reseller in the execution of its Nutanix opportunities.

In support of the vendor, Alpha Data will be inviting customers to its state-of-the-art Digital Information Centre where it will offer live demos and proof of concepts (PoCs) of Nutanix solutions. The two companies will also jointly host events and customer master classes to educate the market about the importance of having a well-defined cloud computing strategy in place as part of overall digital transformation initiatives, as well as latest cloud computing technology updates.

Talking about the partnership, Bassam Al Masri, Director of Channel – METI at Nutanix said, “As a solutions provider, Alpha Data has built a solid reputation as a company that has the experience, technical expertise, market coverage and drive that can help technology vendors more fully reach and penetrate the regional market. The company has provided end-to-end infrastructure solutions to thousands of satisfied customers in UAE. We believe that with a strong partner like Alpha Data, Nutanix will be able to help enterprises in the country embark on their hybrid cloud journey.”

“The market today is changing from the earlier model of traditional datacenters to new, innovative and dynamic cloud models that are accelerating digital transformation. Nutanix as a company is playing a big role in this transition. As a world leader in enterprise cloud computing, Nutanix is aiming to be the operating system for the cloud. This partnership is very valuable for Alpha Data as the vendor’s technology helps fills a gap in our solutions portfolio and complements our existing technology vendor partners. We believe we are now strategically positioned to empower a hybrid cloud enabled workforce and drive the concept of a digital workspace supported by Nutanix technology,” concluded Mr. Amar Singh, Director – Sales at Alpha Data.

Thunder TPS Provides 1.2 Tbps Blocking Capacity with Machine Learning

Fuelled by massive IoT botnets and new reflected amplification exploits, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to grow in size and sophistication and have broken the 1 Tbps barrier. The current pandemic has only increased the threat as cyber attackers find new targets in healthcare, government, online gaming and remote working services. Service providers, MSSPs and enterprises require a new generation of DDoS protection technology to protect their networks.

To respond to this threat, A10 is offering a leap forward for service providers with DDoS protection at the scale required to stop today’s cyber threats. We are releasing the highest-performance DDoS protection appliance to help service providers and MSSPs mitigate the largest DDoS attacks.

The A10 Thunder® Threat Protection System (TPS) 7655 provides up to 1.2 Tbps blocking capacity and 380 Gbps scrubbing capacity. Combining Zero-day Automated Protection (ZAP) powered by artificial intelligence (AI) via machine learning (ML) and advanced software mitigations, Thunder TPS delivers unprecedented protection in a compact 1.5U form factor, enabling customers to efficiently scale-out their DDoS defenses as the threat landscape expands. The Thunder 7655 TPS will be available in Q3 2020.

New Protection for QUIC Protocol Driving Next-generation Applications

In addition, A10 is bringing first-to-market support for HTTP/3 (QUIC) DDoS protection in software.

To ensure the user experience for business and consumer services that are migrating to the cloud, QUIC is rapidly being adopted by content and cloud providers, leading browser developers, such as Mozilla and Google, and is backed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The QUIC protocol provides faster connect times with built-in security versus the traditional combination of TCP and TLS. It also offers a dramatic reduction in latency that will enable better user experience for content-rich web applications. Based on these benefits, HTTP/3 has also adopted QUIC for use on the transport layer.

A10 is the first major software and hardware DDoS vendor to provide DDoS protection for HTTP/3 and the QUIC protocol. Thunder TPS protects this new transport mechanism from DDoS attacks and enables a safer next generation of web services using this protocol. HTTP/3 and QUIC protocol support is available now for all Thunder TPS customers.

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the leader in cloud data services, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Spot, a leader in compute management and cost optimization on the public clouds, to establish leadership in Application Driven Infrastructure. 

Digital transformation initiatives have accelerated and remain the top business priority, especially in today’s environment, and the public clouds offer the speed and flexibility needed to navigate this new normal as companies find to new ways to work, interact and do business. However, unoptimized clouds can be costly and slow down the business transformation. To address this challenge, an Application Driven Infrastructure translates the application’s workload patterns and drives the best possible level of performance and cost for storage and compute, all done while maintaining the contracted service-level agreement (SLA) and service-level objective (SLO). Together, NetApp and Spot’s Application Driven Infrastructure for continuous optimization will help customers save up to 90 percent of their compute and storage cloud expenses, which typically make up 70 percent of total cloud spending, and will help accelerate public cloud adoption.

“In today’s public clouds, speed is the new scale. However, waste in the public clouds driven by idle resources and overprovisioned resources is a significant and a growing customer problem slowing down more public cloud adoption,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager, Public Cloud Services, NetApp. “The combination of NetApp’s leading shared storage platform for block, file and object and Spot’s compute platform will deliver a leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy. Optimized customers are happy customers and happy customers deploy more to the public clouds.”

Spot provides a combination of tools for visibility and automation, that drive continuous optimization of workloads in a single platform while maintaining both SLA and SLO. This relieves DevOps, CloudOps, and FinOps teams from the burden and complexity of managing, scaling, tuning and optimizing cloud resources so that they can focus on business innovation under acceptable budget controls.  

“Spot was founded with a vision to revolutionize the way companies consume cloud infrastructure services, using analytics and automation to deliver the most reliable, best performing and most cost-efficient infrastructure for every workload on every cloud,” said Amiram Shachar, Founder and CEO, Spot. “We look forward to joining the NetApp family and building together the future of Application Driven Infrastructure and helping customers to deploy more workloads in the cloud.”

Together, NetApp and Spot will establish an Application Driven Infrastructure to enable customers to deploy more applications to public clouds faster with Spot’s “as-a-service” platform for the continuous optimization of both compute and storage for both traditional IT buyers with enterprise applications, cloud-native workloads and data lakes. 

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of NetApp’s fiscal year and is subject to the satisfaction of certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation efforts for organizations everywhere, driving rapid adoption of new cloud technologies to support remote working and online learning. In response, Extreme Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXTR), a cloud-driven networking company, has launched a #NewNormal initiative to help all of its customers adapt to the transition. The #NewNormal initiative is a comprehensive program that provides information and industry insights to help companies survive and thrive leveraging the industry’s only 4th generation cloud management platform.

ExtremeCloud IQ™ is a machine learning and AI- driven cloud management solution, built on a 4th generation cloud platform. Integrated with Extreme’s end-to-end enterprise networking technology, it assists in collecting data to build, secure, and maintain agile and distributed work environments. For organizations bringing employees back to work and students back to school, ExtremeCloud IQ helps ensure safe mobility on campus with IoT and robotics connectivity and visibility, as well as support for occupancy management and contact tracing applications.

Use Cases:

• Facilitating Agile Work Environments – For organizations needing to connect, secure, and manage remote network sites or remote workers, or enable distance learning, ExtremeCloud IQ can be deployed to manage Extreme’s curated Portable Branch Kits (PBK) and Bring Your Office Home Kits (BYOH). ExtremeCloud IQ offers analytics and tools to proactively monitor and optimize network health across every part of an organization, whether it be a fixed or temporary location, or over a wired or wireless network. As people return to work and school, the flexible and portable ExtremeCloud IQ application allows IT administrators to adjust to changing user, device, and data requirements.

• Occupancy Management – For facilities, human resources, and legal teams tasked with reducing risk reduction via safe social distancing, ExtremeCloud IQ integrates with Extreme network solutions and third-party technologies to provide real-time and historical presence analytics, location monitoring, and building monitoring, as well as real-time location services and in-door positioning. The collected data allows third-party applications to alert on excessive levels of congregation, volume of traffic over time, no-go zones, violations of directional flows, or other parameters, including notifying staff when an area requires additional sterilization after prolonged or excessive occupancy.

• IoT Monitoring and Robotics Automation – For organizations needing a high-level of visibility and environmental monitoring, Extreme offers secure wired and wireless connectivity and simple, secure device onboarding and management via ExtremeCloud IQ. The application provides complete visibility and management of connected devices that monitor health and safety, without requiring technical staff or staging services. It offers correlation of device location and gathered data, with unlimited data available in July. It also helps to manage remote operations for unmanned manufacturing facilities that are using robotics assistance to minimize staff exposure.

• Contact Tracing Enablement – The same network that is already providing corporate communication is also continually monitoring, gathering, and recording client activity. With ExtremeWireless™ access points, managed by ExtremeCloud IQ, organizations have complete visibility into their distributed network traffic, providing specific location information and unlimited historical data, starting in July. Administrators can easily track where users connected, where they roamed within the facility, and what other devices were connected in those areas at the same time, and then feed that data to third-party applications that support contact tracing.

Executive Perspectives

Norman Rice, Chief Operating Officer, Extreme Networks

“As we grapple with more data, coming from more places, more connected devices, and more SaaS-based applications, the cloud is becoming fundamental to establishing a new normal. This means organizations need an even better cloud – one that delivers infinite 9s of uptime, dependable and uncorrupted data over an unlimited time span, and the industry’s best security. That comes with a 4th generation cloud and Extreme is the only company that has one with its ExtremeCloud IQ platform.”  

Zeus Kerravala, Principal, ZK Research  

“Distributed connectivity demands even better centralized management. In a post-COVID world, IT teams in every industry will need more control and better insights than ever before to ensure a secure, enterprise-grade connection for employees, wherever they are located, and cloud applications and management will be required to scale and adapt. Extreme is working closely with customers and partners to implement security measures that help build trust, and to enable an agile and productive workforce wherever employees may be signing in from. Its 4th generation, unified cloud management solution makes it all possible.”