If Sun Tzu were a VAR…

This week, I spent some time with Matt Rupert, the Aruba CAM for the Southwest. I’ll make this post a two-parter since I got a couple of great gems out of my time with Matt. First is this: Aruba is evangelizing the concept of “rightsizing” the network.

The idea is that hundeds of thousands of organizations that have adopted wireless networking are duplicating ports needlessly and spending more money on their network than they need to.  While Cisco needs to keep refreshing their wired switched ports to continue to meet the expectations of Wall Street, you the trusted advisor can help these customers find the right balance between wired and wireless ports so they can save money and be green.

A state university system recently used StatSeeker monitoring software to discover that a whopping 40% of their patched ports had ZERO usage for a period of 3 months.  The next time they refreshed their network, they were able to buy more than 2,000 802.11n AP’s with the money they saved in right sizing their wired ports.

If Sun Tzu were a business partner, this is precisely where he would attack Cisco who isn’t going to think about cannibalizing their sacred cash cow (switched ports). As Matt pointed out, you could build a whole business practice around this concept.

Good Selling,

Tom

Post Script: The above could be combined with my previous post to produce new client relationships.