Tag Archives: Aruba Networks

Aruba Isn’t A Wireless Company (Any More)

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Remember when Aruba was a wireless company? I know it sounds like something that happened 40 years ago but the idea that Aruba only really made wireless access points and some campus switches to support them isn’t as old as you think. The company, now known as HPE Aruba Networking (née Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company), makes more than just Wi-Fi gear. Yet the perception of the industry is that they’re still a wireless company looking to compete with the largest parts of the market.

Branching Out of Office

This year’s Aruba Atmopshere showed me that Aruba is trying to do more than just campus wireless. The industry has shifted away from just providing edge connectivity and is now focused on a holistic lineup of products that are user-focused. You don’t need to go much further than the technical keynote on the second day of the conference to see that. Or the Networking Field Day Experience videos linked above.

Do you know what Aruba wanted to showcase?

  • Campus Switches
  • Data Center Switches
  • Private 5G/LTE
  • SASE/SSE
  • IoT
  • Cloud-Enabled Management

You know what wasn’t on that list? Access points. For a “wireless” company that’s a pretty glaring omission, right? I think it’s actually a brilliant way to help people understand that HPE Aruba Networking is a growing part of the wider HPE business dedicated to connectivity.

It’s been discussed over the years that the HPE acquisition of Aruba was a “reverse acquisition”. That basically means that HPE gave Aruba control over their campus (and later data center) networking portfolio and let them run with it. It was successful and really helped highlight the needs that HPE had in that space. No one was talking about the dominance of Procurve switches. HPE was even reselling Arista gear at the time for the high end customers. Aruba not only was able to right the ship but help it grow over time and adopt home-grown offerings.

When you think of companies like Juniper and Cisco, do you see them as single product vendors? Juniper makes more than just service provider routers. Cisco makes more than just switches. They have distinct lines of business that provide offerings across the spectrum. They both sell firewalls and access points. They both have software divisions. Cisco sells servers and unified communications gear on top of everything else they do. There’s more to both of them than meets the eye.

Aruba needed to shed the wireless moniker in order to grow into a more competitive market segment. When you’re known as a single product vendor you tend to be left out of conversations. Would you call Palo Alto for switches or wireless? No, because they’re a firewall or SASE company. Yes, they make more than those products but they have a niche, as opposed to more diverse companies. I’m not saying Palo Alto isn’t diverse, just that they define their market segment pretty effectively. So much so that people don’t even call application firewalls by that name any longer. They’re “Palo Altos”, giving the company the same generic trademark distinction as Kleenex and Velcro.

User Face-to-Face

Aruba needs to develop the product lines that help get users connected. Wireless is an easy layup for them now so where do they expand? Switches are a logical extension so the CX lines were developed and continue to do well. The expansion into private LTE and security also help significantly, which are bolstered by their recent acquisitions.

Security is an easy one to figure out. Aruba has gone from SD-Branch, focused on people working in remote offices, to add on true SD-WAN functionality with the Silver Peak purchase, to now offering SSE with Axis Security being folded in to the mix. SSE is a growing market segment because the services offered are what users consume. SASE works great if you’re working from home all the time. In the middle of the pandemic that was a given. People had home offices and did their work there.

But now that restrictions are relaxed and people aren’t going into the office all the time. This hybrid work model means no hardware to do the inspection. Since SSE is not focused on hardware it’s a great fit for a mobile hybrid workforce. If you remember how much Aruba was touting the BYOD wireless-only office trend back in 2016 and 2017 you can see how SSE would have been a wonderful fit back then if it had existed. Given how the concept of a wireless-only BYOD office was realized through not having an office I’d say SSE is a perfect fit for the modern state of the enterprise.

Private 5G is a bit more complicated. Why would Aruba embrace a technology that effectively competes with its core business? I’d say that’s because they need to understand the impact that private cellular will have on their business. People aren’t dumping Wi-Fi and moving en masse to CBRS. We’ve reached a point where we’re considering what the requirements for private LTE deployments need to look like and where the real value lies for them. If you have a challenging RF environment and have devices capable of taking SIM cards it makes a lot of sense. Aruba having a native way of providing that kind of connectivity for users that are looking to offer it is also a huge win. It’s also important to note that Aruba wants to make sure it has complete control over the process, so what better way than acquiring a mature company that can integrate into their product lines?

Tom’s Take

I can’t take full credit for this idea. Avril Salter pointed it out during a briefing and I thought it was a wonderful point. Aruba isn’t a wireless company now because they’ve grown to become a true networking company. They offer more than just APs and devices that power them. There have a full line of products that address the needs of a modern user. The name change isn’t just a branding exercise. It represents a shift in the way people need to see the company. Growing beyond what you used to be isn’t a bad thing. It’s a sign of maturity.

Charting the Course For Aruba

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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?

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.

Back In The Saddle Of A Horse Of A Different Color

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I’ve been asked a few times in the past year if I missed being behind a CLI screen or I ever got a hankering to configure some networking gear. The answer is a guarded “yes”, but not for the reason that you think.

Type Casting

CCIEs are keyboard jockeys. Well, the R&S folks are for sure. Every exam has quirks, but the R&S folks have quirky QWERTY keyboard madness. We spend a lot of time not just learning commands but learning how to input them quickly without typos. So we spend a lot of time with keys and a lot less time with the mouse poking around in a GUI.

However, the trend in networking has been to move away from these kinds of input methods. Take the new Aruba 8400, for instance. The ArubaOS-CX platform that runs it seems to have been built to require the least amount of keyboard input possible. The whole system runs with an API backend and presents a GUI that is a series of API calls. There is a CLI, but anything that you can do there can easily be replicated elsewhere by some other function.

Why would a company do this? To eliminate wasted effort. Think to yourself how many times you’ve typed the same series of commands into a switch. VLAN configuration, vty configs, PortFast settings. The list goes on and on. Most of us even have some kind of notepad that we keep the skeleton configs in so we can paste them into a console port to get a switch up and running quickly. That’s what Puppet was designed to replace!

By using APIs and other input methods, Aruba and other companies are hoping that we can build tools that either accept the minimum input necessary to configure switches or that we can eliminate a large portion of the retyping necessary to build them in the first place. It’s not the first command you type into a switch that kills you. It’s the 45th time you paste the command in. It’s the 68th time you get bored typing the same set of arguments from a remote terminal and accidentally mess this one up that requires a physical presence on site to reset your mistake.

Typing is boring, error prone, and costs significant time for little gain. Building scripts, programs, and platforms that take care of all that messy input for us makes us more productive. But it also changes the way we look at systems.

Bird’s Eye Views

The other reason why my fondness for keyboard jockeying isn’t as great as it could be is because of the way that my perspective has shifted thanks to the new aspects of networking technology that I focus on. I tell people that I’m less of an engineer now and more of an architect. I see how the technologies fit together. I see why they need to complement each other. I may not be able to configure a virtual link without documentation or turn up a storage LUN like I used to, but I understand why flash SSDs are important and how APIs are going to change things.

This goes all they way back to my conversations at VMunderground years ago about shifting the focus of networking and where people will go. You remember? The “ditch digger” discussion?

 

This is more true now than ever before. There are always going to be people racking and stacking. Or doing basic types of configuration. These folks are usually trained with basic knowledge of their task with no vision outside of their job role. Networking apprentices or journeymen as the case may be. Maybe one out of ten or one out of twenty of them are going to want to move up to something bigger or better.

But for the people that read blogs like this regularly the shift has happened. We don’t think in single switches or routers. We don’t worry about a single access point in a closet. We think in terms of systems. We configure routing protocols across multiple systems. We don’t worry about a single port VLAN issue. Instead, we’re trying to configure layer 2 DCI extensions or bring racks and pods online at the same time. Our visibility matters more than our typing skills.

That’s why the next wave of devices like the Aruba 8400 and the Software Defined Access things coming from Cisco are more important than simple checkboxes on a feature sheet. They remove the visibility of protocols and products and instead give us platforms that need to be configured for maximum effect. The gap between the people that “rack and stack” and those that build the architecture that runs the organization has grown, but only because the middle ground of administration is changing so fast that it’s tough to keep up.

Tom’s Take

If I were to change jobs tomorrow I’m sure that I could get back in the saddle with a couple of weeks of hard study. But the question I keep asking myself is “Why would I want to?” I’ve learned that my value doesn’t come from my typing speed or my encyclopedia of networking command arguments any more. It comes from a greater knowledge of making networking work better and integrate more tightly into the organization. I’m a resource, not a reactionary. And so when I look to what I would end up doing in a new role I see myself learning more and more about Python and automation and less about what new features were added in the latest OSPF release on Cisco IOS. Because knowing how to integrate technology at a high level is more valuable to everyone than just knowing the commands to type to turn the lights on.

Don’t Touch My Mustache, Aruba!

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dont-touch-my-mustache

It’s been a year since Aruba Networks became Aruba, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company. It’s  been an interesting ride for everyone involved so far. There’s been some integration between the HPE Networking division and the Aruba teams. There’s been presentations and messaging and lots of other fun stuff. But it all really comes down to the policy of non-interference.

Don’t Tread On Me

HPE has done an admirable job of keeping their hands off of Aruba. It sounds almost comical. How many companies have acquired a new piece and then done everything possible to integrate it into their existing core business? How many products have had their identity obliterated to fit in with the existing model number structure?

Aruba isn’t just a survivor. It’s come out of the other side of this acquisition healthy and happy and with a bigger piece of the pie. Dominick Orr didn’t just get to keep his company. Instead, he got all of HPE’s networking division in the deal! That works out very well for them. It allows Aruba to help integrate the HPE networking portfolio into their existing product lines.

Aruba had a switching portfolio before the acquisition. But that was just an afterthought. It was designed to meet the insane requirements of the new Gartner Wired and Wireless Magic Quadrant. It was a product pushed out to meet a marketing need. Now, with the collaboration of both HPE and Aruba, the combined business unit has succeeded in climbing to the top of the mystical polygon and assuming a leading role in the networking space.

Could you imagine how terrible it would have been if instead of taking this approach, HPE had instead insisted on integration of the product lines and renumbering of everything? What if they had insisted that Aruba engineers, who are experts in their wireless field, were to become junior to the HPE wireless teams? That’s the kind of disaster that would have led to the fall of HPE Networking sooner or later. When good people get alienated in an acquisition, they flee for the hills as fast as their feet will carry them. One look at the list of EMC and VMware departures will tell you the truth of that.

You’re Very Welcome

The other thing that makes it an interesting ride is the way that people have reacted to the results of the acquisition. I can remember seeing how folks like Eddie Forero (@HeyEddie) were livid and worried about how the whole mess was going to fall apart. Having spoken to Eddie this week about the outcome one year later, he seems to be much, much more positive than he was in the past. It’s a very refreshing change!

Goodwill is something that is very difficult to replace in the community. It takes ages to earn and seconds to destroy. Acquiring companies that don’t understand the DNA of the company they have acquired run the risk of alienating the users of that solution. It’s important to take stock of how you are addressing your user base and potential customers regularly after you bring a new business into the fold.

HPE has done a masterful job of keeping Aruba customers happy by allowing Aruba to keep their communities in place. Airheads is a perfect example. Aruba’s community is a vibrant place where people share knowledge and teach each other how to best utilize solutions. It’s the kind of place that makes people feel welcome. It would have been very easy for HPE to make Airheads conform to their corporate policies and use their platforms for different purposes, such as a renewed focus on community marketing efforts. Instead, we have been able to keep these resources available to all to keep a happy community all around.

Tom’s Take

The title above is actually holds a double meaning. You might think it refers to keeping your hands off of something. But “don’t touch my mustache” is a mnemonic phrase to help people remember the Japanese phrase do itashimashite which means “You’re Welcome”.

Aruba has continued to be a leader in the wireless community and is poised to make waves in the networking community once more because HPE has allowed it to grow through a hands-off policy. The Aruba customers and partners should be very welcome that things have turned out as they have. Given the graveyard of failed company acquisitions over they years, Aruba and HPE are a great story indeed.