Enterprises moving away from large capex outlays, says HPE

Firms don't want to invest in hardware only to find it's out of date two years later, says HPE Aruba exec

Enterprises are moving away from large capex (capital expenditure) outlays, as they're wary of hardware becoming obsolete soon after purchase.

That's the view of Chris Kozup, VP of marketing at HPE Aruba. He explained that this pitches large enterprises in with SMEs, who don't necessarily even have the capex available for large infrastructure purchases.

"Enterprises don't want to invest in hardware only to find in two years that what they purchased is out of date," said Kozup. "And that is very much aligned with the desires of the SME market. They don't necessarily have the IT expertise in-house, and also typically don't have the deep pockets of large corporates."

Kozup was speaking to Computing about Aruba's new product, called Aruba Central.

"It's a cloud management networking solution," explained Kozup. "It allows SMEs to manage their network through a simple cloud-based GUI. It enables the simple management of the network, policies, and security. It removes the complexity that has traditionally existed with more enterprise grade solutions, and also allows users to move away from traditional capex spending models to more of a 'network-as-a-service' model," he added.

This chimes with Computing's own experiences, with technology leaders from three large enterprises all recently describing their own digital transformation projects, involving the disposal of large amounts of infrastructure as most services are farmed out to the cloud.

Darren Price, CIO of insurer RSA explained that his project was partly about saving costs, and partly about improving capability.

Albert Hitchcock, CTO and COO of publisher and education group Pearson is also overseeing a digital transformation project at his organisation, again with the aim to reduce costs and move from managing hardware to managing services.

And a further CIO who wished not to be named, but oversees technology at one of the world's largest employers, also recently told Computing about his project, which involves ditching almost all infrastructure across his entire group, and moving wholesale into the cloud.