By now you’ve seen the news that longtime CEO of Aruba Keerti Melkote is retiring. He’s decided that his 20-year journey has come to a conclusion and he is stepping down into an advisory role until the end of the HPE fiscal year on October 31, 2021. Leaving along with him are CTO Partha Narasimhan and Chief Architect Pradeep Iyer. It’s a big shift in the way that things will be done going forward for Aruba. There are already plenty of hot takes out there about how this is going to be good or bad for Aruba and for HPE depending on which source you want to read. Because I just couldn’t resist I’m going to take a stab at it too.

Happy Trails To You

Keerti is a great person. He’s smart and capable and has always surrounded himself with good people as well. The HPE acquisition honestly couldn’t have gone any better for him and his team. The term “reverse acquisition” gets used a lot and I think this is one of the few positive examples of it. Aruba became the networking division of HPE. They rebuilt the husk that was HP’s campus networking division and expanded it substantially. They introduced new data center switches and kept up with their leading place in the access point market.

However, even the best people eventually need new challenges. There was always a bit of a looming role on the horizon for Keerti according to many industry analysts. As speculated by Stephen Foskett on this past week’s episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown, Keerti was the odds-on favorite to take over HPE one day. He had the pedigree of running a successful business and he understood how data moving to the cloud was going to be a huge driver for hardware in the future. He even had taken over a combined business unit of networking devices and edge computing renamed Intelligent Edge last year. All signs pointed to him being the one to step up when Antonio Neri eventually moved on.

That Keerti chose to step away now could indicate that he realized the HPE CEO job was not going to break his way. Perhaps the pandemic has sapped some of his desire to continue to run the business. Given that Partha and Pradeep are also choosing to depart as well it could be more of an indicator of internal discussions and not a choice by Keerti to move on of his own accord. I’m not speculating that there is pressure on him. It could just be that this was the best time to make the exit after steering the ship through the rough seas of the pandemic.

Rearranging the Deck Chairs

That brings me to the next interesting place that Aruba finds itself. With Keerti and company off to greener pastures, who steps in to replace them? When I first heard the news of the departure of three very visible parts of Aruba all at once my first thought jumped immediately to David Hughes, the former CEO of Silver Peak.

HPE bought Silver Peak last year and integrated their SD-WAN solutions into Aruba. I was a bit curious about this when it first happened because Aruba had been touting their SD-Branch solution that leveraged ClearPass extensively. To shift gears and adopt Silver Peak as the primary solution for the WAN edge was a shift in thinking. By itself that might have been a minor footnote.

Then a funnier thing happened that gave me pause. I started seeing more and more Silver Peak names popping up at Aruba. That’s something you would expect to see when a company gets acquired. But the people that were hopping into roles elsewhere outside of the WAN side of the house was somewhat shocking. It felt for a while like Silver Peak was taking over a lot of key positions inside of Aruba on the marketing side of the house. Which meant that the team was poised for something bigger in the long run.

When David Hughes was named as the successor to Partha and Pradeep as the CTO and Chief Architect at Aruba it made sense to me. Hughes is good at the technology. He understand the WAN and networking. He doesn’t need to worry about much about the wireless side of the house because Aruba has tons of wireless experts, including Chuck Lukaszewski. Hughes will do a great job integrating the networking and WAN side of the house to embrace the edge mentality that Aruba and HPE have been talking about for the past several months.

So, if David Hughes isn’t running Aruba, who is? That would be Phil Mottram, a veteran of the HPE Communications Technology Group. He has management material written all over him. He’s been an executive at a number of companies and he is going to steer Aruba in the direction that HPE wants it to go. That’s where the real questions are going to start being asked around here. I’m sure there’s probably going to be some kind of a speech by Antonio Neri about how Aruba is a proud part of the HPE family and the culture that has existed at Aruba is going to continue even after the departure of the founder. That’s pretty much the standard discussion you have with everyone after they leave. I’m sure something very similar happened after the Meraki founders left Cisco post-acquisition.

The Sky’s The Limit

What is HPE planning for Aruba? If I were a betting man, I’d say the current trend is going to see Aruba become more integrated into HPE. Not quite on the level of Nimble Storage but nowhere near the practical independence they’ve had for the last few years. We’re seeing that HPE is looking at Aruba as a valuable brand as much as anything else. The moves above in relation to the departure of Keerti make that apparent.

Why would you put a seasoned CEO in the role of Chief Architect? Why would you name a senior Vice President to the role of President of that business unit? And why would the CEO agree to be where he is willingly when that carrot is just out of reach? I would say it’s because David Hughes either realizes or has been told that the role of Chief Architect is going to be much more important in the coming months. That would make a lot of sense if the identity of Aruba begins to be subsumed into HPE proper.

Think about Meraki and Cisco. Meraki has always been a fiercely independent company. You would have been hard pressed for the first year or two to even realize that Cisco was the owner. However, in the past couple of years the walls that separate Cisco and Meraki have started to come down. Meraki is functioning more like a brand inside of Cisco than an independent part of the organization. It’s not a negative thing. In fact, it’s what should happen to successful companies when they get purchased. However, given the independence streak of the past it seems more intriguing than what’s on the surface.

Aruba is going to find itself being pulled in more toward HPE’s orbit. The inclusion of Aruba in the HPE Intelligent Edge business unit says that HPE has big plans for the whole thing. They don’t want to have their customers seeing HPE and Aruba as two separate things. Instead, HPE would love to leverage the customers that Aruba does have today to bring in more HPE opportunities. The synergy between the two is the whole reason for the acquisition in the first place. Why not take advantage of it? Perhaps the departure of the old guard is the impetus for making that change?

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Tom’s Take

Aruba isn’t going to go away. It’s not going to be like a storage solution being eaten alive and then disappearing into a nameplate on a rack unit. Aruba has too much value as a brand and a comfortable position in the networking space to be completely eliminated. However, it is going to become more valuable to have the expertise of the Aruba teams creating more synergy inside of HPE and leading efforts to integrate the edge networking and compute solutions together to come out ahead as people shift some of their workloads around to take advantage of all the work that’s been done there. Time will tell if Aruba stays separate enough to be remembered as the titan they’ve been.