Aruba Helps Home Depot Reinvigorate Its Network to Improve Customer and Employee Experience

Aruba, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE), recently announced that Home Depot® , a leading global home improvement retailer, has selected Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) delivered by HPE GreenLake for Aruba to comprehensively improve the network experience of customers and employees in its stores across the U.S. At present, Home Depot has further deepened its partnership with Aruba. Aruba's advanced network service capabilities have helped Home Depot build a solid network foundation that is fast, scalable and flexible. HPE GreenLake for Aruba (NaaS) provides Home Depot with a solution that combines agility and flexibility.

It is critical for Home Depot to provide a seamless and hassle-free online experience for its customers and 500,000 employees. As an innovation leader in the retail industry, Home Depot is working hard to enhance the interactive customer experience across the digital and physical worlds: on the one hand, it can help customers easily complete a one-stop home improvement shopping experience from browsing, searching to purchasing; on the other hand, customers can enjoy a consistent service experience whether they are in a physical store, browsing online, or using a mobile app. At present, physical stores are still the center of the customer experience. In the first quarter of 2022, more than 50% of Home Depot's online orders were completed through physical stores.

"Our goal is to use technology to eliminate frictions that customers and associates face every day," said Daniel Grider, vice president of technology at The Home Depot. "Our customers trust us to provide the right tools and materials to meet their home improvement needs, so when customers come into our stores, our web services can support interactive features such as in-store navigation or image search, so they can find the products they need more quickly."

Customers are at the heart of everything Home Depot does. Therefore, any investment and initiative in technology is designed to make it easier for customers to design their home improvement projects and purchase materials in a visual way. For example, providing strong network connectivity in stores will help Home Depot employees provide a better experience for customers. Today, Home Depot employees can easily check prices and inventory of goods at hand or more than 40 feet away through the use of networked Zebra TC52ax handheld computers, which is very effective for serving customers and locating products in the top floor warehouse.

Home Depot's newly upgraded network will simplify IT operations management. The Aruba Central integrated cloud management platform with AIOps function can proactively monitor network health and resolve network problems before they have a negative impact on performance. In addition, the wireless solution used by Home Depot includes Aruba positioning services, which are implemented through self-positioning WLAN access points. It can automatically determine the location of access points in a zero-touch manner, perform continuous verification and location updates, and provide a set of universal coordinate systems that can be converted on any building floor plan or network map platform.

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