Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the completion of its US$925 million acquisition of SD-WAN leader, Silver Peak on Monday. 

HPE expects the deal to strengthen their subsidiary Aruba Edge Services Platform’s ability to help enterprise cloud transformation.

“WAN transformation is a key component of HPE’s Intelligent Edge and edge-to-cloud vision and growth strategy,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE.

Specifically, the combination of Aruba’s all-in-one SD-Branch portfolio and remote working solutions with Silver Peak’s self-driving SD-WAN and WAN optimisation solutions will allow Aruba to cover all aspects of wired, wireless local area networking (LAN) and wide area networking (WAN). 

“Armed with a comprehensive SD-WAN portfolio with the addition of Silver Peak, we will accelerate the delivery of a true distributed cloud model and cloud experience for all apps and data wherever they live,” added Mr. Neri.

This acquisition comes at a time when enterprises are investing heavily in Software-Defined Wide Area Network technologies, as legacy WAN architectures are causing high costs and operational difficulties.

“With the evolving nature of the hybrid workplace, enterprises are looking to extend connectivity to branch locations and enable secure work-from-home experiences,” commented Keerti Melkote, the President of Intelligent Edge for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and founder of Aruba Networks.

SD-WAN solutions are expected to simplify networks, enable enterprises to scale up and empower application awareness at the digital edge, which is becoming an increasingly popular location to store data.

As part of the acquisition, Silver Peak founder and CEO David Hughes, will join HPE as the Senior Vice President of the WAN business within Aruba.

“Digital transformation, cloud-first IT architectures, and the need to support a mobile work-from-anywhere workforce are driving enterprises to rethink the network edge. The combination of Silver Peak and Aruba will uniquely enable customers to realize the full transformational promise of these IT megatrends,” said Mr. Hughes.

Competition heating up in the enterprise networking market

The competition in the SD-WAN market is heating up, with HPE’s acquisition as well as Equinix extending a deal with VMware to offer SD-WAN solutions on their Network Edge.

The deal is predicted to boost HPE’s capabilities against competitor Cisco Systems in the enterprise networking market. 

“This gives HPE a leg up on Cisco,” said Michael Maher, the Director of Professional Services at CPP Associates. 

“In the past, HPE and Cisco were on unequal footing,” he added.

Maher said he sees the deal giving more muscle to HPE’s Aruba networking-as-a-service offering versus public cloud. 

“HPE can now compete across the complete technology stack with storage, compute and now software-defined networking,” said Mr. Maher.

HPE expects the Silver Peak deal to be neutral to non-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles earnings per share in fiscal year 2022.

Got a story, opinion or more information on this article? Contact us at editor@w.media.
And get the latest data center, cloud and cybersecurity updates by signing up to the W.Media Newsletter!