Aruba Atmosphere 2021: 5 Bold Statements We Heard From Aruba, HPE, And Silver Peak

Aruba‘s Keerti Melkote, Aruba’s parent HPE’s Antonio Neri, and Silver Peak’s David Hughes came out at Aruba Atmosphere 2021 in full-force to talk edge, SD-WAN, and how the company has a leg up on the competition when it comes to the IT as a service trend.

Aruba On The Record

Networking specialist Aruba Networks, a HPE company, has been busy bringing its partners and customers on a journey to the edge of the network.

The edge has been were all the action is happening -- especially after more than a year of employees outside of the enterprise campus, students learning from home, and even applications showing up in brand-new places, including hospital parking lots. Aruba and its partners have been helping businesses digitally transform their businesses with tech, and that includes security, SD-WAN, hybrid cloud, and AI, according to Aruba Founder and President Keerti Melkote. To that end, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based in 2020 introduced the Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP), an intelligent architecture that is helping partners and end customers manage their increasingly complicated wired, wireless, SD-WAN and security infrastructures. Aruba also last year acquired SD-WAN leader Silver Peak for $925 million and has been working to bake SD-WAN more deeply into the Aruba portfolio, starting with Aruba ESP.

During a keynote at Aruba Atmosphere 2021, Aruba’s Melkote, Aruba parent company HPE CEO and President Antonio Neri, and Silver Peak Founder David Hughes talked about demand for Aruba ESP, the move toward consumption-based IT, or the as a service model, and how the Aruba/Silver Peak combination stacks up against the competition.

Here’s what the executives had to say.

Keerti Melkote On Aruba ESP

We launched the Aruba Edge Services Platform last year. The building blocks of the platform [were] connect; to get everything connected and data flowing; protect, to ensure that cybersecurity is at the heart of everything we do. And then of course, ultimately delivering on the business value which is: analyze the data, and then act upon it. These came together in a unified platform which we call Aruba ESP. ESP was the name intentionally because AI is going to be at the heart of this and we want to be able to deliver this as a service. Aruba Central is the vehicle from which ESP is consumed. You can obviously experience ESP in home environments for work from home, branch offices, campuses, data centers and clouds.

One important thing I want to touch on is how [customers] have embraced ESP and it’s reflected in the momentum that we’re seeing in the business. 2020 has been a remarkable year. Initially, we saw a little bit of a decline of business, like everybody else. But it came roaring back and the last nine months have been a dramatic acceleration of the adoption of ESP as a platform. The business has shown growth, consecutive growth quarter-over-quarter and most recent quarter, we entered the double-digit growth territory, which has been fantastic for a business of our scale. One huge win that really signaled the adoption of ESP in a big way was [with] the Pentagon. The Pentagon has always been using Aruba Wi-Fi for their wireless needs, but they also now have switched over to using Aruba CX for their switching architecture. The entire building effectively is delivered as an Aruba ESP edge.

David Hughes On Secure SD-WAN Vs. The Competition

Everybody in the industry has a different heritage. And we’ve got one that’s unique. There are a bunch of innovators in this area like Zscalar, or Netskope, that were truly born in the cloud. And they’re coming at this problem thinking, how do we solve the problem from the cloud? What can we do in the cloud? How can we help? And how can we direct traffic to ourselves in the cloud, perhaps using agents? On the other side of the table, you’ve got security players that were born in the data center, [companies] like Cisco, Palo Alto, or Fortinet. They specialize in building a perimeter around your most precious assets. They’re in the data center building a fortress. And now, as perimeter is dissolving, they’re thinking about how to take their perimeter-based technology and repurpose that for a world where the cloud is more important.

As I said, Silver Peak and Aruba are rather unique in that we weren’t born in the cloud. And honestly, we weren’t born in a data center. Both companies were born at the edge of the network. I think that gives us a really unique perspective on how we think about security. We think of the edge as being at least as important as the data center, or the cloud. We think the edge is the pivot point that enables you to make a security transformation, and a WAN transformation at the edge. You’re allowed to make this journey without compromise and doing things in a way that makes sense for you, and your business, and where you’re at.

Neri On The Edge Opportunity

At HPE, we believe that edge is the next frontier. The edge is where experiences happen: in stores, in schools, in the home; anywhere technology gets put into action. Three years ago, we predicted the enterprise of the future would be edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. In acquiring Aruba in 2015, we were well-positioned for this position.

Aruba Central today is the industry-leading cloud networking solution with AI-powered insights, workflow automation, and robust security that enables it to manage and optimize campus and branch remote and data center networks from a single dashboard. Aruba Central now supports over 90,000 customers, managing 1.3 million network devices and more than 10 million devices. It is a proven enterprise-grade cloud platform with true global scale. And that’s just the start. The technology that underpins Aruba Central is being integrated across our portfolio as we unify and simplify your edge to cloud experience with HPE.

Neri On The IT As A Service Trend

We are living in an edge to cloud world as every company races to digitally transform, and that requires secure connectivity and the flexibility and agility that comes with a cloud computing experience, [as well as] the ability to process, manage, and mine their data regardless of where it lives.

HPE’s edge to cloud platform as a Service strategy is setting the bar in the industry. Our solution spans all aspects of networking, storage and compute. HPE’s GreenLake is key to customers transformation efforts. We are strides ahead of our competitors. They are unable to match the breadth and depth of our edge to cloud portfolio. At HPE, we provide a true as a service experience that lets you focus on the innovation and outcomes you need to drive your business, not the underlying infrastructure. We give you choice in how you consume and manage your worlds through our industry-leading solution, HP GreenLake. The cloud that comes to you.

Melkote On SD-WAN And The Edge

SD-WAN is going to be a foundational technology that brings the edge and the cloud together. In addition to organic developments that we have done with SD-Branch, we also were fortunate to bring Silver Peak into the Aruba family. And adding [Silver Peak] to the portfolio of [Aruba] ESP allows us to really deliver SDN capabilities in a plethora of different configurations. Zero-trust and SASE [are going] to be important ingredients enabling this edge to cloud architecture of the future.