Hewlett Packard Enterprise will purchase Silver Peak, an SD-WAN leader, in a transaction valued at $925 million. Silver Peak will be combined with HPE’s Aruba business unit and will extend Aruba’s technology leadership in the large and fast-growing SD-WAN space.

Silver Peak has a great SD-WAN solution but one of its challenges was going up against huge players like Cisco, Oracle and VMWare. These large companies can no longer cast doubt on Silver Peak solutions as being less viable because of its smaller company size.

“HPE was an early mover in identifying the opportunity at the edge and that trend is accelerating in a post-COVID world,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “With this acquisition we are accelerating our edge-to-cloud strategy to provide a true distributed cloud model and cloud experience for all apps and data wherever they live. Silver Peak’s innovative team and technology bring critical capabilities that will help our customers modernize and transform their networks to securely connect any edge to any cloud.”

Silver Peak’s SD-WAN offerings are highly complementary and strengthen Aruba’s Edge Service Platform (ESP). By combining Silver Peak’s SD-WAN with Aruba’s SD-Branch solutions customers can simplify branch office and WAN deployments to empower remote workforces, enable cloud-connected distributed enterprises, and transform business operations without compromising quality or reliability.

“Today’s announcement comes at a unique moment for our customers, who are grappling with business recovery in the wake of the pandemic,” said Keerti Melkote, president of Intelligent Edge for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and founder of Aruba Networks. “The need for edge-to-cloud architectures has never been more relevant as enterprises look to 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. Together, we will be able to meet these needs with critical connectivity, security, and AI capabilities to drive the next generation of Edge-to-Cloud transformation.”

Silver Peak has more than 1,500 production SD-WAN customers around the world. The company helps enterprises and service providers quickly migrate to secure enterprise-grade SD-WAN connectivity, while dramatically improving application performance and lowering connectivity costs. Powered by Silver Peak’s SD-WAN edge platform, customers can achieve dedicated WAN-like performance while running all cloud applications and services via broadband access. Silver Peak also enables freedom of choice to leverage best-in-class technologies from a broad range of ecosystem partners, particularly those focused on security.

“Bringing together Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN solutions with Aruba’s industry-leading networking portfolio provides an unprecedented opportunity to deliver comprehensive business-driven solutions to our customers,” said David Hughes, founder and CEO of Silver Peak. “The Silver Peak and Aruba teams share a common vision and goal to provide simplicity, scalability, and application-awareness at the edge. With Aruba’s extensive go-to-market, we will further accelerate our ability to drive faster adoption of these transformational technologies. We are excited for the opportunities we will have as a combined team to accelerate innovation in this fast-growing segment of the networking market.”

The combination of Aruba’s all-in-one SD-Branch strategy and remote worker solutions with Silver Peak’s SD-WAN and WAN optimization offerings will allow HPE to better address a greater set of customer requirements and capitalize on this market opportunity.

In 2018 HPE announced its strategic plan to invest $4 billion in Intelligent Edge over four years, and the company has been identifying opportunities to better help customers convert their data – from every edge to any cloud – into actionable insights that drive seamless interactions, while delivering simplified user and IT experiences. The recent impacts of the global pandemic have intensified customers’ requirements for powerful solutions at the edge that put a premium on security, connectivity, and performance. This investment is consistent with HPE’s core strategy focused on accelerating investments in areas of attractive, profitable growth including the Intelligent Edge.

The companies expect the combination to create opportunities for significant economic upside through enhanced growth and profitability by:

• Providing a superior value proposition to joint customers through integrated offerings that address a greater set of customer requirements
• Targeting an expanded TAM across SD-WAN and SD-Branch implementations
• Accelerating WAN transformations across HPE and Aruba’s broad global customer base

In short, this is a smart move for HPE as the SD-WAN market is rapidly accelerating and the company hasn’t focused on it enough to grow share. With this massive investment in the space, HPE proves it has deep enough pockets to buy market share. Going forward, we need to see HPE continue and expand the investment in channel, sales, and R&D Silver Peak has been making over the years.

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