Tag Archives: HPE

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.

The Silver (Peak) Lining For HPE and Cloud

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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.

The Good, The Bad, and The Questionable: Acquisition Activities

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Sometimes I read the headlines when a company gets acquired and think to myself, “Wow, that was a great move!” Other times I can’t really speak after reading because I’m shaking my head too much about what I see to really make any kind of judgement. With that being said, I think it’s time to look at three recent acquisitions through the lens of everyone’s favorite spaghetti western.

The Good – Palo Networks Alto Buys Twistlock: This one was kind of a no-brainer to me. If you want to stay relevant in the infrastructure security space you’re going to need to have some kind of visibility into containers. If you want to stay solvent after The Cloud destroys all infrastructure spending forevermore, you’re going to need to learn how to look into containers. And when you’re ready and waiting for the collapse of the cloud, containers are probably still going to be relevant.

Joking aside, this is a great move for Palo Alto Networks. They’re getting a lot of container talent and can start looking at all kinds of ways to integrate that into their solution sets. It lets people in the organization justify the spend they have for security solutions by allowing them to work alongside the new constructs that the DevOps visionaries are using this week.

By the way, you can check out more about Palo Alto Networks June 19th at Security Field Day 2

The Bad – HPE Buys Cray?: Hands up if you were waiting for Cray to get purchased. Um, okay. Hands up if you thought Cray was actually still in business? Wow. No hands. Hmmm…

HPE has a love affair with HPC. And not just because they share a lot of letters in their acronyms. HPE has wanted to prove it has the biggest, baddest CPUs on the block. From all their press about The Machine to all the work they’ve done to build huge compute platforms, it is very clear that HPE thinks the future of HPC involves building big things. And who has the best reputation for having amazingly awesome supercomputers?

Here’s my issue with this purchase: Why does HPE think that the future of compute lies outside the cloud? Are they secretly hoping to build a supercomputer cluster and offer it for rent via a cloud service? Or are they realizing they have no hope of catching up in the cloud race and they’re just conceding that they need to position themselves in a niche market to drive revenue from the kinds of customers that can’t use the cloud for whatever reason? There isn’t a lot of room for buggy whip manufacturers any more, but I guess if you make the best one of the lot you win by default.

Given the HPE track record of questionable acquisitions (Aruba aside), I’m really taking a wait-and-see approach to this. I’d rather it be an Aruba success and not an Autonomy debacle.

The Questionable – NXP Buys Marvell Wi-Fi: This one was the head scratcher of the bunch for me. Why is this making headlines now? Well, in part because NXP is scrambling to fill out their portfolio. As mentioned in the linked article, NXP had been resting on their laurels a bit in hopes that the pending Qualcomm acquisition from last year would give them access to the pieces they needed to move into new markets like industrial and communications infrastructure.

Alas, the Qualcomm deal fell apart for political reasons. Which means people are picking up the pieces. And NXP is getting one of the pieces their desperately needed for just shy of $2 billion. But what’s the roadmap? Sure, Marvell has a lot of customers already that use their wireless and Bluetooth chipsets in a wide range of devices. But you don’t make a acquisition like that just for an existing customer base. You need synergy. You need expansion. You need to boost revenues across both companies to justify paying a huge price. So where’s the additional market going to come from? Are they going to double down on industrial and automotive connectivity? Or are they thinking about different expansion plans?

Tom’s Take

Acquisitions in the tech sector are no different from blockbuster trades in the sports world. Sometimes you cheer about a big pickup for a team and other times you boo at the crazy decisions that otherwise sane people made. But if you follow things closely enough you can usually work out which people are crazy like a fox as opposed to just plain crazy.

HPE Networking: Past, Present, and Future

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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.

The 25GbE Datacenter Pipeline

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SDN may have made networking more exciting thanks to making hardware less important than it has been in the past, but that’s not to say that hardware isn’t important at all. The certainty with which new hardware will come out and make things a little bit faster than before is right there with death and taxes. One of the big announcements yesterday from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) during HPE Discover was support for a new 25GbE / 100GbE switch architecture built around the FlexFabric 5950 and 12900 products. This may be the tipping point for things.

The Speeds of the Many

I haven’t always been high on 25GbE. Almost two years ago I couldn’t see the point. Things haven’t gotten much different in the last 24 months from a speed perspective. So why the change now? What make this 25GbE offering any different than things from the nascent ideas presented by Arista?

First and foremost, the 25GbE released by HPE this week is based on the Broadcom Tomahawk chipset. When 25GbE was first presented, it was a collection of vendors trying to convince you to upgrade to their slightly faster Ethernet. But in the past two years, most of the merchant offerings on the market have coalesced around using Broadcom as the primary chipset. That means that odds are good your favorite switching platform is running Trident 2 or Trident 2+ under the hood.

With Broadcom backing the silicon, that means wider adoption of the specification. Why would anyone buy 25GbE from Brocade or Dell or HPE if the only vendor supporting it was that vendor of choice? If you can’t ever be certain that you’ll have support for the hardware in three or five years time, making an investment today seems silly. Broadcom’s backing means that eventually everyone will be adopting 25GbE.

Likewise, one of my other impediments to adoption was the lack of server NICs to ramp hosts to 25GbE. Having fast access ports means nothing if the severs can’t take advantage of them. HPE addressed this with the release of FlexFabric networking adapters that can run 25GbE Ethernet. More importantly, those adapters (and switches) can run at 10GbE as well. This means that adoption of higher bandwidth is no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. You don’t have to abandon your existing investment to get to 25GbE right away. You don’t have to build a lab pod to test things and then sneak it into production. You can just buy a 5950 today and clock the ports down to 10GbE while you await the availability and purchasing cycle to buy 25GbE NICs. Then you can flip some switches in the next maintenance window and be running at 25GbE speeds. And you can leave some ports enabled at 10GbE to ensure that there is maximum backwards compatibility.

The Needs of the Few

Odds are good that 25GbE isn’t going to be right for you today. HPE is even telling people that 25GbE only really makes sense in a few deployment scenarios, among which are large container-based hosts running thousands of virtual apps, flash storage arrays that use Ethernet as a backplane, or specialized high-performance computing (HPC) tricks with RDMA and such. That means the odds are good that you won’t need 25GbE first thing tomorrow morning.

However, the need for 25GbE is going to be there. As applications grow more bandwidth hungry and data centers keep shrinking in footprint, the network hardware you do have left needs to work harder and faster to accomplish more with less. If the network really is destined to become a faceless underlay that serves as a utility for applications, it needs to run flat out fast to ensure that developers can’t start blaming their utility company for problems. Multi-core server architectures and flash storage have solved two of the three legs of this problem. 25GbE host connectivity and the 100GbE backbone connectivity tied to it, solve the other side of the equation so everything balances properly.

Don’t look at 25GbE as an immediate panacea for your problems. Instead, put it on a timeline with your other server needs and see what the adoption rate looks like going forward. If server NICs are bought in large quantities, that will drive manufactures to push the technology onto the server boards. If there is enough need for connectivity at these speeds the switch vendors will start larger adoption of Tomahawk chipsets. That cycle will push things forward much faster than the 10GbE / 40GbE marathon that’s been going on for the past six years.

Tom’s Take

I think HPE is taking a big leap with 25GbE. Until the Dell/EMC merger is completed they won’t find themselves in a position to adopt Tomahawk quickly in the Force10 line. That means the need to grab 25GbE server NICs won’t materialize if there’s nothing to connect them. Cisco won’t care either way so long as switches are purchased and all other networking vendors don’t sell servers. So that leaves HPE to either push this forward to fall off the edge of the cliff. Time will tell how this will all work out, but it would be nice to see HPE get a win here and make the network the least of application developer problems.

Disclaimer

I was a guest of Hewlett Packard Enterprise for HPE Discover 2016. They paid for my travel, hotel, and meals during the event. While I was briefed on the solution discussed here and many others, there was no expectation of coverage of the topics discussed. HPE did not ask for, nor were they guaranteed any consideration in the writing of this article. The conclusions and analysis contained herein are mine and mine alone.

Don’t Touch My Mustache, Aruba!

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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.