HPE announces intent to acquire Silver Peak

July 13, 2020 | Keerti Melkote, President, Intelligent Edge for HPE and founder of Aruba Networks

Accelerating the deployment of secure, integrated WAN connectivity from Edge-to-Cloud

In this article

  • Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN offerings strengthen Aruba ESP (Edge Service Platform) by doubling down on our cloud capabilities
  • We share the same vision and common goal— providing simplicity, scalability, and application-awareness at the Edge

Today HPE (Aruba’s parent company) announced its intent to acquire Silver Peak, a leader in the fast-growing SD-WAN market. Silver Peak will become part of Aruba to deliver a comprehensive secure networking portfolio to address customer requirements across Campus, Branch, Data Center and Remote Worker environments.

Today’s announcement comes at a unique moment for our customers, who are grappling with business recovery in the wake of the pandemic. The impact of COVID-19 has accelerated the need for a highly distributed work environment—where employees need the flexibility to work from home or their traditional workplace. Enterprise-grade access that delivers reliable and secure access to their cloud applications is critical for both branch and home workers so they can remain safe and productive. Together, Aruba and Silver Peak will be able to meet these needs with critical connectivity, security, and AI capabilities that are needed to connect the Edge to the cloud

With more than 1,500 production SD-WAN customers globally, Silver Peak helps enterprises and service providers quickly migrate to secure enterprise-grade SD-WAN connectivity, while dramatically improving application performance and lowering connectivity costs. With the addition of Silver Peak to the Aruba portfolio, customers will be able to achieve dedicated WAN-like performance while running all cloud applications and services via broadband. Silver Peak is also one of only two Leaders recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, 2019 which complements Aruba’s leadership in wired and wireless networking.

This acquisition represents an exciting milestone for both companies, but here are some of the things that I’m most excited about:

For Our Customers and Partners
 

  • Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN offerings strengthen Aruba ESP (Edge Service Platform) by doubling down on our cloud capabilities. By combining Silver Peak’s SD-WAN with Aruba’s SD-Branch solutions, our customers will be able to simplify branch office and WAN deployments to empower remote workforces, enable cloud-connected distributed enterprises, and transform business operations without compromising quality or reliability.

  • The recent health and economic crisis has fast-tracked the need for Edge-to-Cloud architectures as enterprises extend connectivity to branch locations and enable secure work-from-home experiences. Silver Peak’s technology transforms legacy WAN architectures to self-driving WANs, which is a perfect fit with Aruba’s cloud-native, AI-driven Edge Services Platform. This will be additive to our SD-Branch and remote worker solutions that deliver branch transformation and enable secure work-from-home experiences for our customers.

  • Our combined portfolio will also help customers during these challenging financial times when budgets are stretched thin. Our combined SaaS and NaaS offerings allow our customers to remain agile with consumption and financial flexibility that is especially important today.

For our Employees
 

  • In our discussions with Silver Peak’s team, I have been impressed by the culture of innovation and their approach to coming at problems with a customer-first mindset. Culture is critical in any acquisition and I knew that the combination of our two companies would provide a win for both employees and our customers because we share the same vision and common goal— providing simplicity, scalability, and application-awareness at the Edge.

  • On top of that, we share the same company values: a customer first, customer last approach; a team culture where intellectual honesty thrives; and a belief that innovation is critical to our ongoing success.
     

As we look to the future, we are excited for the opportunities we will have as a combined team to drive the next generation of Edge-to-Cloud transformation. We are thrilled to welcome the entire Silver Peak team to the Aruba family and look forward to sharing our best-in-class technologies with our customers.

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