Aruba, Polycom Partner For Remote UC Delivery
Under a new agreement, announced Tuesday, Polycom has certified Aruba's Virtual Branch Networking (VBN) offering with its own video and UC products. What that does is give solution providers and the enterprises they serve the ability to offer Polycom products to remote users, via the VBN, and save the hassle of configuring mobile offices with virtual private networks (VPN) on a case-by-case basis.
According to Aruba, cost can be as little as $99 per site: the price of Aruba's remote access points delivered using Aruba's Virtual Intranet Client.
"We're providing a remote network that is corporate-grade and also with the same security and management. That's not necessarily new, but what has been a challenge in the past is that these aren't self-installable," said Manav Khurana, head of industry marketing for Aruba. "This is easy to set up and easy to manage, with options."
"Users are getting a lot more demanding -- they want to be able to do everything remotely and mobile, from the home office, everywhere," added Stuart Phillips, senior product manager, networking and security solutions, at Polycom. "So you get into these ridiculous situations where the IT department is trying to figure out which home router you should have on which carrier and figure out why it's not working. We're getting customers who want full capabilities and want to be able to use all the services they use in the office."
Bundled Polycom-Aruba remote solutions are available to Polycom VARs that are also Aruba solution providers. Polycom VARs who don't carry both vendors, however, can acquire Aruba VBN products from distributor ScanSource, according to the vendors.
Aruba and Polycom executives will be hosting events during September to get solution providers up to speed on selling with both sets of products in mind. Partners should expect more joint, go-to-market opportunities for the companies down the line, Khurana said.
Aruba updated its VBN platform in March. Its expanded alliance with Polycom continues a trend of major networking vendors joining forces around UC, cloud and networking delivery.