Tag Archives: Aruba

Charting the Course For Aruba

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The Silver (Peak) Lining For HPE and Cloud

Posted on by
Reply

You no doubt saw the news this week that HPE announced that they’re buying Silver Peak for just shy of $1 billion dollars. It’s a good exit for Silver Peak and should provide some great benefits for both companies. There was a bit of interesting discussion around where this fits in the bigger picture for HPE, Aruba, and the cloud. I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring and take a turn discussing it.

Counting Your Chickens

First and foremost, let’s discuss where this acquisition is headed. HPE announced it and they’re the ones holding the purse strings. But the acquisition post was courtesy of Keerti Melkote, who runs the Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (Aruba) side of the house. Why is that? It’s because HPE “reverse acquired” Aruba and sent all their networking expertise and hardware down to the Arubans to get things done.

I would venture to say that Aruba’s acquisition was the best decision HPE could have made. It gave them immediate expertise in an area they sorely needed help. It gave Aruba a platform to build on and innovate from. And it ultimately allowed HPE to shore up their campus networking story while trying to figure out how they wanted to extend into the data center.

Aruba was one of the last major networking players to announce a strategy based on SD-WAN. We’ve seen a lot of major acquisitions on that front, including Cisco buying Viptela, VMware buying VeloCloud, Palo Alto Networks buying CloudGenix, and Oracle buying Talari. That last one is going to be important later in this story. Aruba didn’t go out and buy their own SD-WAN solution. Instead, they developed it in-house leveraging the expertise they had with ClearPass. Instead of calling it SD-WAN and focusing on connecting islands together, they used the term SD-Branch to denote the connectivity was more about the users in the branch and not the office itself.

I know that SD-Branch isn’t a term that’s en vogue with most analysts. But it’s important to realize that Aruba was trying to say more about the users than anything else. Hardware was an afterthought in this solution. It wasn’t about an edge gateway, although Aruba had those. It wasn’t about connectivity, even though Aruba could help on that front too. Instead, it was about pushing policy down to the edge and sorting out connectivity for devices. That’s the focus that Aruba had for many years with their wireless roots. It only made sense to leverage the tools to get where they wanted to be on the SD-Whatever front.

Coming Home To Roost

The world of SD-WAN isn’t the same as the branch any longer, though. Now, SD-WAN drives cloud on-ramp and edge security. Ironically enough, the drive to include Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) in SD-WAN is way more in line with the original concept of SD-Branch as defined by Aruba a couple of years ago. But you have to have a more well-rounded solution that includes cloud.

Why do you need to worry about the cloud? If you still have to ask that question in 2020 you’re not gonna make it in IT much longer. The cloud operationalizes a lot of things in IT that we have just accepted for years. The way that we do workloads and provisioning has changed on-site as well. If you don’t believe me then listen to HPE. Their biggest focus coming out of HPE Discover this year has been highlighting GreenLake, their on-premises IT-as-a-Service offering. It’s designed to give you cloud-like performance in your data center with cloud-like billing options. And, as marketed, the ability to move workloads back and forth between on-site and in-cloud as needed.

Hopefully, you’re starting to see why Silver Peak was such an important pickup for HPE now. SD-Branch is focused on devices but not services. It’s not designed to provide cloud on-ramp. HPE and Aruba need a solution that gives you the ability to accelerate user adoption of software-as-a-service no matter where it lives, be it in GreenLake or AWS or Azure. Essentially, HPE and Aruba needed Talari for their cloud offerings. And that’s what they’re going to get with Silver Peak.

Silver Peak has focused on cloud intelligence to accelerate SaaS for a few years now. They also have a multi-cloud networking solution. Multi-cloud is the way that you get people working between two different clouds, like AWS and GreenLake for example.

When you tie in Silver Peak’s DC-focused SD-WAN solution with Aruba’s existing SD-Branch capabilities, you see how holistic a solution you have now. And because it’s all based on software you don’t have to worry about clunky integration. It can run side-by-side for now and in the next revision of Aruba Central integration with the new Edge Services Platform (ESP), it’s all going to be seamless to use however you want to use.

Tom’s Take

I think Silver Peak is a good pickup for HPE and Aruba. Just remember that when you hear HPE and networking in the same sentence, you need to think about Aruba. Ultimately, the integration of Silver Peak into Aruba’s SD-Branch solution is going to benefit everyone from users to cloud to software and back again. And it’s going to help position Aruba as a major player in the SD-WAN market. Which is a silver lining on any cloud.

Fast Friday – Aruba Atmosphere 2019

Posted on by
1

A couple of quick thoughts that I’m having ahead of Aruba Atmosphere next week in Las Vegas, NV. Tech Field Day has a lot going on and you don’t want to miss a minute of the action for sure, especially on Wednesday at 3:15pm PST. In the meantime:

  • IoT is really starting to more down-market. Rather than being focused on enabling large machines with front-end devices to act as gateways we’re starting to see more and more IoT devices either come with integrated connective technology or interface with systems that do. Building control systems aren’t just for large corporations any more. You can automate an office on the cheap today. Just remember that any device that can talk can also listen. Security posture is going to be huge.
  • I remember some of the discussions that we had during the heady early days of SDN and how unimpressed wireless and mobility people were when they figured out how the controllers and dumb edge devices really worked. Most wireless pros have been there and done that already. However, recently there has been a lot of movement in the OpenConfig community around wireless devices. And that really has the wireless folks excited. Because the promise of SDN for them has never been about control, but instead about compatibility. The real key isn’t building another controller but instead making all the APs and controllers work better together.
  • Another great thing I’m looking forward too seeing at Atmosphere is Aruba HER. It’s an event focused on building stronger communities and increasing diversity for all. You can read a bit more about what will be going on there in this post from Claire Chaplais. Make sure to check out Zoë Rose keynoting the event as well! She’s got a very powerful story to tell. She gave us all a bit of it at Security Field Day last December in this Ignite Talk.

Tom’s Take

Make sure you stay tuned for all the things we’re going to be discussing during the event. We’re going to be using the event hashtag #ATM19 but also using #MFDx as a way to let you know about the great stuff we will have going on!

Wireless Thoughts From Aruba Atmosphere

Posted on by
1

I just got back from Aruba Atmosphere this week and I thought it would be a good chance to go over some of the cool stuff that I saw there.

  • Rasa is now Aruba NetInsights. That platform is going to be a big one for Aruba in the future. There’s a lot of information that is being gleaned from installations and it’s fueling some hard looks at best practices and such. Also funny that it’s being installed primarily in university campuses to profile coverage and client capabilities. Those are usually pretty hostile environments for users and administrators alike.
  • The security pieces that were shown off were also very interesting. The idea of port profiles has always made me a bit skeptical, but the way that Aruba is doing actual traffic profiling makes me think they have it this time. It’s also really cool that it can be done with non-managed devices in the middle. I think the key is that Aruba is doing actual traffic profiling instead of just looking at the basics behind the packets, like ports or VLANs. Real, automatic port security could be a huge win for places that need on-the-fly access to rapidly changing conditions. Like, say, university campuses.
  • Live demos rock when your technology is solid enough that you don’t have to worry about it blowing up on stage. We’re past the point of the wireless network blowing up the iPhone 4 for Steve Jobs. In fact, the best part was that the demo was slower because the demo guy had an extra espresso shot and the camera couldn’t hold still!

Look for some interesting discussion from Tech Field Day and stay tuned to hear more about Atmosphere from the delegates!

HPE Networking: Past, Present, and Future

Posted on by
2

hpe_pri_grn_pos_rgb

I had the chance to attend HPE Discover last week by invitation from their influencer team. I wanted to see how HPE Networking had been getting along since the acquisition of Aruba Networks last year. There have been some moves and changes, including a new partnership with Arista Networks announced in September. What follows is my analysis of HPE’s Networking portfolio after HPE Discover London and where they are headed in the future.

Campus and Data Center Divisions

Recently, HPE reorganized their networking division along two different lines. The first is the Aruba brand that contains all the wireless assets along with the campus networking portfolio. This is where the campus belongs. The edge of the network is an ever-changing area where connectivity is king. Reallocating the campus assets to the capable Aruba team means that they will do the most good there.

The rest of the data center networking assets were loaded into the Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG). This group is headed up by Dominick Wilde and contains things like FlexFabric and Altoline. The partnership with Arista rounds out the rest of the switch portfolio. This helps HPE position their offerings across a wide range of potential clients, from existing data center infrastructure to newer cloud-ready shops focusing on DevOps and rapid application development.

After hearing Dom Wilde speak to us about the networking portfolio goals, I think I can see where HPE is headed going forward.

The Past: HPE FlexFabric

As Dom Wilde said during our session, “I have a market for FlexFabric and can sell it for the next ten years.” FlexFabric represents the traditional data center networking. There is a huge market for existing infrastructure for customers that have made a huge investment in HPE in the past. Dom is absolutely right when he says the market for FlexFabric isn’t going to shrink the foreseeable future. Even though the migration to the cloud is underway, there are a significant number of existing applications that will never be cloud ready.

FlexFabric represents the market segment that will persist on existing solutions until a rewrite of critical applications can be undertaken to get them moved to the cloud. Think of FlexFabric as the vaunted buggy whip manufacturer. They may be the last one left, but for the people that need their products they are the only option in town. DCIG may have eyes on the future, but that plan will be financed by FlexFabric.

The Present: HPE Altoline

Altoline is where HPE was pouring their research for the past year. Altoline is a product line that benefits from the latest in software defined and webscale technologies. It is technology that utilizes OpenSwitch as the operating system. HPE initially developed OpenSwitch as an open, vendor-neutral platform before turning it over to the Linux Foundation this summer to run with development from a variety of different partners.

Dom brought up a couple of great use cases for Altoline during our discussion that struck me as brilliant. One of them was using it as an out-of-band monitoring solution. These switches don’t need to be big or redundant. They need to have ports and a management interface. They don’t need complexity. They need simplicity. That’s where Altoline comes into play. It’s never going to be as complex as FlexFabric or as programmable as Arista. But it doesn’t have to be. In a workshop full of table saw and drill presses, Altoline is a basic screwdriver. It’s a tool you can count on to get the easy jobs done in a pinch.

The Future: Arista

The Arista partnership, according to Dom Wilde, is all about getting ready for the cloud. For those customers that are looking at moving workloads to the cloud or creating a hybrid environment, Arista is the perfect choice. All of Arista’s recent solution sets have been focused on providing high-speed, programmable networking that can integrate a number of development tools. EOS is the most extensible operating system on the market and is a favorite for developers. Positioning Arista at the top of the food chain is a great play for customers that don’t have a huge investment in cloud-ready networking right now.

The question that I keep coming back to is…when does this Arista partnership become an acquisition? There is a significant integration between the two companies. Arista has essentially displaced the top of the line for HPE. How long will it take for Arista to make the partnership more permanent? I can easily foresee HPE making a play for the potential revenues produced by Arista and the help they provide moving things to the cloud.

Tom’s Take

I was the only networking person at HPE Discover this year because the HPE networking story has been simplified quite a bit. On the one hand, you have the campus tied up with Aruba. They have their own story to tell in a different area early next year. On the other hand, you have the simplification of the portfolio with DCIG and the inclusion of the Arista partnership. I think that Altoline is going to find a niche for specific use cases but will never really take off as a separate platform. FlexFabric is in maintenance mode as far as development is concerned. It may get faster, but it isn’t likely to get smarter. Not that it really needs to. FlexFabric will support legacy architecture. The real path forward is Arista and all the flexibility it represents. The question is whether HPE will try to make Arista a business unit before Arista takes off and becomes too expensive to buy.

Disclaimer

I was an invited guest of HPE for HPE Discover London. They paid for my travel and lodging costs as well as covering event transportation and meals. They did not ask for nor were they promised any kind of consideration in the coverage provided here. The opinions and analysis contained in this article represent my thoughts alone.

Don’t Touch My Mustache, Aruba!

Posted on by
2

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.

HP Is Buying Aruba. Who’s Next?

Posted on by
4

HPAruba_Networks_Logo

Sometimes all it takes is a little push. Bloomberg reported yesterday that HP is in talks to buy Aruba Networks for their wireless expertise. The deal is contingent upon some other things, and the article made sure to throw up disclaimers that it could still fall through before next week. But the people that I’ve talked to (who are not authorized to comment and wouldn’t know the official answer anyway) have all said this is a done deal. We’ll likely hear the final official confirmation on Monday afternoon, ahead of Aruba’s big Atmosphere (nee Airheads) conference.

R&D Through M&A

This is a shot in the arm for HP. Their Colubris-based AP lineup has been sorely lacking in current generation wireless technology, let alone next gen potential. The featured 802.11ac APs on their networking site are OEMed directly from Aruba. They’ve been hoping to play the OEM game for a while and see where the chips are going to fall. Buying Aruba gives them second place in the wireless market behind Cisco overnight. It also fixes the most glaring issue with Colubris – R&D. HP hasn’t really been developing their wireless portfolio. Some had even thought it was gone for good. This immediately puts them back in the conversation.

More importantly to HP, this acquisition cuts off many of their competitor’s wireless plans at the knees. Dell, Juniper, Brocade, Alcatel Lucent, and many others OEM from Aruba or have a deep partnership agreement. By wrapping up the entirety of Aruba’s business, HP has dealt a blow to the single-source vendors that are playing in the wireless market. And this is going to lead to some big changes relatively soon.

The Startup Buzz

Dell is perhaps the most impacted by this announcement. A very large portion of their wireless offerings were Aruba. They sold APs, controllers, and even ClearPass through their channels (with the names filed off, of course). Now, they are back to square one. How are they going to handle the most recent deals? What are their support options?

I little thought exercise with my friend Josh Williams (@JSW_EdTech) had a few possibilities:

  1. Dell forces HP to buyout all the support contracts for Dell/Aruba customers. That makes sense for Dell, but it will turn a lot of customers against them, especially when HP lets those customers know the reasons why.
  2. Dell agrees to release the developments they’ve done on the platform to HP in return for HP taking the support business. Quiet and clean. Which is why it likely won’t happen.
  3. Dell pays HP an exorbitant amount of money to take the support contracts. This gives HP the capital to take on all those new support contracts and gives Dell an exit to rebuild. This is probably what HP wants, but could end up sinking the deal.

Dell got burned, plain and simple. They likely could have purchased Aruba months ago and solidified the relationship. Instead, they are now looking for a new partner. However, I don’t think they are going to get burned again. Rather than shopping for a friend, they are going to be shopping for an acquisition. My money has always been on Aerohive. They have an existing relationship. The Aerohive controller-less cloud model fits Dell’s new strategies. And they would be a much cheaper pickup than Aruba. There is precedence for Dell skipping the big name and picking up a smaller company that’s a better fit. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it gives Dell the chance to move forward with a lasting relationship.

Softwarely Defined

Brocade is a line-of-business partner of Aruba. They’ve only recently gotten involved since Motorola shut down their WLAN business. This is a good sign for them. That means they can exit from their position and not be significantly affected. It does leave them with a quandary of where to go.

The first choice would be to go back to the Motorola relationship, now in the form of Zebra Technologies. Zebra inherited quite a large portion of the WLAN space from Motorola, but they’ve been keeping rather quiet about it. Are they angling to be more of a support organization for existing installs? Or are they waiting for a big splash announcement to get back in the game? Partnering with Brocade would give them that announcement given the elevated profile Brocade has today.

Brocade’s other option would be to go down the SDN road. The plan for a while has been to embrace SDN, OpenFlow, and all things software defined. The natural target for this would be Meru Networks. Meru has been embracing SDN as well as of late. They had a nice event last year showcasing their advances in SDN. Brocade could bolster that SDN knowledge while obtaining a good wireless company that would give them the strength they need to augment their enterprise business.

Permission To Retire

The odd company out is Juniper. I’ve heard that they were involved at first in trying to acquire Aruba, but when you’re betting against HP’s pockets you will lose in the long run. Their other problem is Elliott Management, everyone’s new favorite “activist investor”.

Elliott has made no secret that they see the value in Juniper in the service provider market. As far back as last year, Elliott has been trying to get Juniper to reave off the ancillary businesses, including security, enterprise, and wireless. Juniper has officially ended sales for Trapeze-based products already. Why would Elliott let them buy another wireless company so soon after getting rid of the last one. Even as successful as Aruba is, Elliott would see it as another distraction. And when someone that active is calling the shots, you can’t go against them, lest you end up unemployed.

This is the end for Juniper’s wireless aspirations. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. This gives them the impetus needed to focus on the service provider market. It also gives them a smaller enterprise switching portfolio to package up and sell off should that pound of flesh be necessary to sate Elliott as well. Time will tell.

Everyone Else

Any other companies with Aruba relationships are either dipping their toes in the wireless waters or don’t care enough to worry about the impact it will have. It will be an easy matter for companies like Alcatel-Lucent to go out and find a new OEM partner, likely with someone like Extreme Networks or Ruckus. Those companies are making great technology and will be happy to supply the APs that customers need. Showing off their technology will also give them great in-roads into customers that might not have been on their radar before.

Tom’s Take

It’s going to be an exciting time in the wireless space. HP’s acquisition is going to start the falling dominoes for other companies to buy into the wireless space as well. When the dust settles, there will be new number twos and number threes in the market. It also clears the middle of the space for up-and-comers to grow. Cisco is going to stay number one for a while, and HP will be number two when this deal closes. But until we see the fallout from who will be purchased and partnered with it’s tough to say who will be a clear winner. But make sure you’ve got your popcorn ready. Because this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

 

Will Dell Buy Aerohive?

Posted on by
5

DELL-Aerohive-Logo

One rumor I keep hearing about in the industry involves a certain buzzing wireless vendor and the world’s largest startup.  Acquisitions happen all the time.  Rumors of them are even more frequent.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this may be good for everyone.

Dell wants to own the stack from top to bottom.  In the past, they have had to partner with printer companies (Lexmark) and networking companies (Brocade and Juniper) to deliver parts of the infrastructure they couldn’t provide themselves.  In the case of printers, Dell found a way to build them on their own.  That reduced their reliance on Lexmark.  In the networking world, Dell shocked everyone by going outside their OEM relationship and buying Force10.  I’ve talked before about why the Force10 pickup was a better deal in the long run than Brocade.

Dell’s Desires

Dell needs specific pieces of the puzzle.  They don’t want to be encumbered with ancillary products that will need to be jettisoned later.  Buying Brocade would have required unwinding a huge fibre channel business.  In much the same way, I don’t think Dell will end up buying their current wireless OEM, Aruba Networks.  Aruba has decided to branch out past the doing simple wireless and moved into wired network switches and security and identity management programs like ClearPass.  Dell doesn’t want any of that.  They already have an issue integrating the Force10 networking expertise into the PowerConnect line.  I’ve been told in the past the FTOS will eventually come to PowerConnect, but that has yet to happen.  Integrating purchased companies isn’t easier.  That becomes exponentially harder the more product lines you have to integrate.

Aruba is too expensive for Dell to buy outright.  Michael Dell spent a huge chunk of his cash to get his company back from the shareholders.  He’s going to put it on a diet pretty soon.  I would expect to see a few product lines slimmed down or outright dropped.  That makes it tough to justify buying so much from another company.  Dell needs a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

Aerohive’s Aspirations

Aerohive is the best target for Dell.  They are clearly fighting for third place in the wireless market behind Cisco and Aruba.  Aerohive has never been shy about punching above their weight.  They have the mentality of a scrappy terrier that won’t go down without a fight.  But, they are getting pressure to expand quickly across their product lines.  They took their time releasing an 802.11ac access point.  Their switching offering hasn’t caught on in the same way that of Aruba or Meraki (now a division of Cisco).

Aerohive is on the verge of going public.  I’m sure the infusion of cash would allow them to pay off some early investors as well as fund more development for 802.11ac Phase 2 gear and maybe a firewall offering.  The risk comes when you look at what happened to Ruckus Wireless shortly after their IPO.  While they did recover, it didn’t look very good for a company that supposedly did have a unique claim, their antenna design.  Aerohive is a cloud management platform like many others in the market.  You have to wonder how investors would view them.  Scrappy doesn’t sell stock.

Aerohive is now fighting in the new Gartner “Wired and Wireless Access” magic quadrant, which is an absolute disaster for everyone.  An analyst firm thinks that wireless is just like wired, so naturally it makes sense for AP vendors to start making switches, right?  Except the people who are really brilliant when it comes to wireless, like Matthew Gast and Victor Shtrom couldn’t care less about bits on copper.  They’ve spent the better part of their careers solving the RF problems in the world.  And now someone tells them that interference problems aren’t that much different than spanning tree?  I would have long since planted my head permanently onto my desk if I’d been told that in their position.

Aerohive gains a huge backer in the fight if Dell acquires them.  They get the name to go up against Cisco/Meraki.  The gain R&D from Dell with expertise around cloud management.  They can start developing integration with HiveManager and Dell’s SMB extensive product line.  Switch supply becomes a thing of the past.  Their entire software offering fits well with what Dell is trying to accomplish from a device independence perspective with regards to customers.

Tom’s Take

I don’t put much stock in random rumors.  But I’ve heard this one come up enough to make me ask some tough questions.  There are people in both camps that think it will happen sometime in 2014.  Dell has to get the books sorted out and figure out who’s in charge of buying things.  Aerohive has to see if there’s enough juice left in the market to IPO and not look foolish.  Maybe Dell needs to run the numbers and find out what it would take to cash out Aerohive’s investors and add the company to the growing Empire of Round Rock.  A little buzz for the World’s Largest Startup couldn’t hurt.