Betting on HPE networking: Ben Fallon on self-driving networks, SASE security, and what partners can expect in November

Robert Dutt: Today’s episode of In The Channel is brought to you by HPE Discover 2026. Discover runs June 15-18 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Discover what’s next at hpe.com/discover.

Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

We’re coming to you this week from HPE Discover Las Vegas, where HPE has been rolling out a significant set of announcements across networking, cloud, and AI infrastructure. The embargoes are lifted, and the Partner Growth Summit is in the books, so we can actually get into the substance of things.

My guest is Ben Fallon, vice president of worldwide channel and partner ecosystem networking sales at HPE. Ben came to this role via the Juniper side of the house. He was running global partner and commercial sales for Juniper Networks when the acquisition closed, and moved into leading the combined networking channel earlier this year.

His session at Discover this week was called “Betting on HPE Networking,” which turned out to be a pretty useful frame for a conversation. We got into what self-driving networks actually mean for a partner having a Monday morning conversation with a customer, the Aruba and Mist integration story, the SASE and security opportunity, and what partners can expect when the unified program formally launches in November.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Ben Fallon.

Ben, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. I know it’s a busy week on site here, I’m sure.

Ben Fallon: It is. It’s a fun week. We’ve got thousands of partners here, but it’s great to be here with you.

Robert Dutt: For listeners who don’t know you or your role, can you give me a quick rundown on what you do here and how you came to be leading networking channels for HPE?

Ben Fallon: Yeah, so like you said, I lead the global networking channel for HPE. I’ve spent the last 25-odd years in the industry, have led channels for a number of the significant vendors in the market. I was part of the Juniper acquisition, most recently running one of the global sales segments, and in January moved over to lead the channel. We’ve got a fantastic opportunity in front of us.

Robert Dutt: I like that you frame it as you’re part of the Juniper acquisition. You’re not taking entire credit for them acquiring Juniper to get your talent.

Ben Fallon: Absolutely not, no. It was a bonus.

Robert Dutt: Absolutely. Your session this week is called “Betting on HPE Networking.” It’s a pretty confident way of looking at it, and obvious given the milieu. Walk me through what the bet looks like from where you sit. What are you asking partners to bet on, and why now?

Ben Fallon: Yeah, so for me, it’s like when you look at a bet, you’ve got to make sure it’s a good one. No one wants to be playing the lottery. That’s got the worst chance of winning. The more strategy that you actually bring into a game, along with some execution, increases your chance of winning. So for us, what increases the chance of winning with HPE Networking is cross-selling. The more you’re selling across the portfolio, the more you’re going to engage with our account teams, the more problems you’re going to solve for our customers. And also, that’s where you can earn the most amount of rebates, and where the program is really geared towards. So if you make a bet on us, we’re making a bet on you, and you’ll get that back in profitability and customer satisfaction.

Robert Dutt: Cross-selling within networking, across the HPE portfolio, or…

Ben Fallon: All of the above. So you can absolutely cross-sell within the portfolio, whether you’re selling campus and branch, or you want to move into selling more security solutions. Or if you’re selling the hybrid cloud solution portfolio from HPE, you need to start getting involved in networking, because it’s going to expand your opportunity, and we know the network is at the heart of all of these AI workloads.

Robert Dutt: One of the big presentations here is about taking the idea of self-driving networks from vision to reality. For a lot of partners, though, the question is always, “What do I take to my customer?” On Monday morning, how do partners translate that message around self-driving networks to a concrete conversation with staff at a customer, and make it map with their care-abouts?

Ben Fallon: Yeah, sure. Well, look, complexity is only increasing. We know there are talent shortages. We know that it’s almost an impossible task to keep up with all the vulnerabilities that are created through AI. And so you have to have AI as part of your defense. So what’s real? Let’s take something like HPE Mist, where that has autonomous actions now built into the dashboard. So we know for certain problems that come up on the network, we know how to remediate them. We don’t need a person to go and click a button. You can literally switch on a toggle, and off it goes. So autonomous networking, with that human deciding where they want that to take place, is already real.

Robert Dutt: You touch on Mist. One thing I do hear from partners sometimes is with the Aruba and Juniper integration, the two platforms you’ve got with Aruba Central and Mist, moving toward common capabilities, but it sounds like the vision is not to merge. What do you tell the partner who’s been selling one side of that equation or the other? And now that we’ve kind of got one HPE networking, what does it mean in practice, basically?

Ben Fallon: Yeah, well, you touched on self-driving. That’s a unified vision across the entire portfolio. And then we’ve got this strategy of cross-pollination. I think if you look at a lot of acquisitions over the years, they’ve spent so long arguing over maybe not a feature, but how do you actually get to that feature to be capable? And innovation dies when that happens. If you want innovation to actually accelerate, which is what we’re seeing, you take the best from each platform, and because they’re built with a microservices architecture, you can build once, deploy twice, and it becomes this incredible boon of innovation on the platform. So I’d say that is real, because customers are voting with their wallet. So there’s a decent amount of cross-pollination, but each kind of remains aimed towards its focus.

Robert Dutt: That’s it.

Ben Fallon: And really what I see with partners is they see this as a growth play in the same way that we do. This is about finding new opportunity. So they may have served some SMB customers with some on-prem part of the Aruba portfolio. Now they’re wanting to get into some mid-sized lower enterprise, and they’re seeing that Mist has some capability that helps get them there. So it’s a growth play for us, and it’s a growth play for the partner.

Robert Dutt: One of the things that caught my attention in the announcements this week was the unified SASE story – bringing SD-WAN and SSE under one management pane. You guys have talked about a billion-dollar security ambition. Pretty big number. What’s the channel’s role in getting to that? And for a partner who hasn’t historically led with networking security, what’s kind of the on-ramp or the easiest first step?

Ben Fallon: Yeah. So first of all, obviously, we’ve got this universal zero-trust network architecture, which we’re really leaning into. And it’s about bringing together the different parts of the security portfolios from across HPE. And obviously with the Juniper acquisition, that brought an even richer portfolio. For partners, pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners, so there is no other path. And what we’re really looking for is – we have some very, very capable, specialized partners on security – I think there’s a bigger opportunity for more partners to be selling HPE networking and security solutions. We’re just getting started. We’re already posting some great numbers. We had some incredible growth just last quarter, and there’s still more partners can do. We are not saturated from the partner landscape selling our security portfolio, so lots of opportunity there.

Robert Dutt: Those additional partners in that space – do you see them being primarily folks who come in from other parts of the HPE network, existing specialists in security who maybe haven’t worked with you in the past, a little bit of both? What’s kind of the…

Ben Fallon: It’s a bit of a combination, but you always have to focus. You can’t go everywhere. And where we’re focusing is on partners that have a pedigree in networking with us, because we’re increasingly seeing that there’s a great attach opportunity, and the convergence of the network and security we think is only going to accelerate.

Robert Dutt: Are we at the point of having a formal program, that kind of thing, to bring those partners on board, or to enable and encourage the partners who are in the HPE sphere, but not yet?

Ben Fallon: Yeah, we do. We have, as part of our Partner Ready Vantage program, our broad certifications that are part of that, and that’s how you get to platinum, gold, silver, etc. But then we have competencies, and we have a number of security competencies that partners can build up that capability. They can pick different parts of the portfolio. They could be brand new to networking, but build up competency in security, and that will bring technical competence and capability, but also incremental profitability for them as well.

Robert Dutt: A lot of talk this week, obviously, about the disruption around VMware – customers reconsidering virtualization strategies and how that drives the refresh cycles within the data center on some of the compute and storage hardware, all that kind of good stuff. Does that also create a network refresh opportunity?

Ben Fallon: So there can be opportunities that do arise. I don’t know if that’s the biggest piece that’s driving growth in data center networking right now. I think the AI boom is doing a significant job there, and probably dwarfs anything else. But what you’ll see is announcements this week around how we’re, really from a technology perspective, bringing more parts of the portfolio together from across the hybrid cloud portfolio and networking. Because really, that’s what customers want. They want integrated technology that solves their problems, and that’s what we’re focused on.

Robert Dutt: From a Canadian channel perspective, where do you see the biggest networking opportunities today? I’m going to guess your answer to the last question strongly informs the answer to this one. But what are the biggest opportunities in the back half of the year? And what’s your ask of Canadian partners who are listening to this?

Ben Fallon: Yeah. Well, there are two things I think are the biggest opportunity. One is cross-selling. If you’re selling part of the HPE portfolio today, look at how you can integrate across the stack – whether that’s the full HPE stack, or whether it’s specific to networking. There’s a huge opportunity there, and we’re seeing that partners that have adopted that are growing faster than anyone else. Second, new logos – going after new customers. We’re here to win. We’re here to be number one, and we’ll do that first in wireless networking. And to do that, we need new customers. And you’ll see new incentives and new programs come out in November that will put even more wood behind the arrow – that’s going to make it an incredible opportunity for partners to go and solve the networking crimes of other vendors and bring them into the light of a self-driving network.

Robert Dutt: You guys are obviously deep into the process of integrating programs between legacy HPE and legacy Juniper. We have the November 1 date, I believe, as the formalized launch date for that becoming one. What can partners expect coming out of that at a programmatic level on the networking side?

Ben Fallon: Yeah. So what we’re doing is, first of all, looking at the experience partners have – everything from how they get certified, trying to simplify that and make sure that they’re not having to do multiple layers and duplicative actions. We’re working on the experience when it comes to things like registering a deal, getting rebates, keeping it simple. I think other vendors I’ve seen, you need a bit of a rocket science degree to figure out how all of these different programs and rebates come together. We’re focusing on keeping it simple, we’re focused on driving action, and most of all – which I think is often missed – we’re making sure that our sales teams know how to engage with partners really well and go and win deals together.

Robert Dutt: Good luck on a big week here at Discover, and thanks for taking the time once again.

Ben Fallon: Appreciated. And we love working with our Canadian partners, and just a big thank you to all of them that are on board already.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Ben Fallon from HPE.

I’d like to thank Ben for his time. We were literally recording between sessions at Discover, and I appreciate him making it work.

And thank you for listening as well. A few things that stuck with me from this one.

The self-driving network story has been fairly abstract for a while, but his Mist example – autonomous remediation actions you can toggle on in the dashboard, no human in the loop for known problem types – it’s the most concrete I’ve heard it get. That’s actually something you can put in front of a customer.

The other thing worth sitting with: “pretty much 100% of our security sales go through partners. There is no other path.” That’s what Ben said. If you’re an HPE networking partner who hasn’t yet built a security practice, and HPE is out there talking about a billion-dollar security ambition, someone is going to capture that opportunity. Make sure it’s you.

And for partners who may have walked away from the Juniper side of the portfolio at acquisition time and have been watching from the sidelines, November is shaping up to be the moment to take another look. Simplified programs, new incentives, a unified experience. It’s worth paying attention to.

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Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.