HPE Aruba is planning to pursue aggressive market share growth in Korea in 2018 by focusing its energies on landing big enterprise deals, according to the company‘s country manager for South Korea on Thursday.

“I believe that Aruba is the only vendor in the networking field that can compete against Cisco for big deals,” said Charles Kang, country manager for Korea at a press conference Thursday in Seoul.

HPE Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, is a leading provider of next-generation network access solutions.

Aruba saw 36 percent on-year growth in fiscal year 2017, roughly four times the 9.1 percent growth seen across the wireless local area network market, on the back of large deals with clients such as Incheon Airport.

As servers become commoditized, the wireless network market is expected to continue growing with large-scale contracts coming from government organizations, hospitality enterprises such as hotels, and schools, Kang said.

Aruba is also building up strength in its operations targeting small and medium businesses. In March, the company plans to launch a new team called Inside Sales Representatives specifically designed to manage closer relations with client smaller client companies.

One of the most important areas for Aruba’s future business will be security as more companies take their assets digital through cloud services and the internet of things.

“If (before) we thought the connectivity and security of devices was single-dimensional, now the problem is more complex with the introduction of other technologies,” said Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Aruba‘s category manager for security and routing in the Asia-Pacific region. 

Krishnamoorthy said that he expected the next six to 18 months to be a period of significant growth in the security solutions field, with the Asian market growing “anywhere from 15 to 30 percent.”

Aruba is building up its competitiveness in this field as well, having become the first company to receive Common Criteria certification in the network access control category for its ClearPass solution.

ClearPass, which allows users to fully manage cybersecurity by identifying devices onloaded to networks and analyzing behavior by various users to detect possible security breaches, is particularly competitive because it is a multivendor system. 

Built to service companies whose IT needs span mobile, cloud and IoT elements, the service can be used to provide security even for clients who are using other vendors’ network solutions according to Krishnamoorthy.

By Won Ho-jung (hjwon@heraldcorp.com)