Aruba

MSP website

The Challenge

Aruba Networks is the leading provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise. However, one of the key challenges they face from a brand point-of-view is that while they have market pre-eminence, they don’t often engage directly with their products’ end-customers, but via third party partner vendors.

These partners can vary in size and resource capacity and as a result, it can be difficult for Aruba to maintain control over how their Manage Service Provider (MSP) offering is represented online via their partners’ websites. The level of consistency their brand requires extends beyond the look and feel of how products are presented, but to the level of information architecture and page structure, user experience, code standards, brand messaging, typography, fonts and colors and content.

As a result, Aruba approached bbd to come up with an innovative solution to help explain the offering, with a select bespoke package that partners can then implement within their own online environments.

The key objective was for the market to come to the MSP showcase websites in order to easily access information and pick and choose the services and products to make their bespoke MSP offer – powered by Aruba.

The Approach

We explored numerous approaches to fulfil the brief, for example a digital style guide, asset management system or a more formal brand management system.

However, we decided to take the brand implementation directly to their partners. We created a website directly for partners that explicitly showed how the brand should be implemented online. In essence, this was essentially a meta-site for how the brand should be presented.

For security and tracking reasons, the site was only available for partners who were members of the Aruba Partner Portal and not publicly accessible. As a result, we created a tokenised authentication mechanism meaning only users who came directly from the Partner Portal gained access to registration.

Eligible partners were able to register with the website against their specific region and once signup to the portal was complete, they were able to access the site in order to understand Aruba’s:

● Preferred information architecture
● Preferred page structure and layout
● Preferred product messaging
● Thinking behind the solution

Additionally, we introduced a number of bespoke features for partners to better help implement the brand in their own website environments:

● Presentation: partners can customise the site theme: font family, weight and theme colour scheme and view the results
● Selection: partners can select the Services, Consulting options and Packages that they offer from the Aruba range for display on the site. Upon making a selection, this will be reflected in the content and navigation, providing users their own bespoke view.
● Resources: partners are able to download all the site assets: markup, CSS, JavaScript, fonts, images, etc. as a package for use within their own digital estate.

The Outcome

The MSP Showcase has been rolled out across EMEA and LATAM and to date have 75% of the MSP registered Partners signed up and 178 unique daily logins with 95%+ of registered MSP Partners from EMEA logging in once or more and using the content available. As a result, we are now looking to extend the platform with multilingual capability.