Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s networking business is taking a serious blow to the arm with the presentation Monday of the company’s plan to acquire Silver Peak, a leading software-defined WAN software, for approximately $ 925 million in cash.
“HPE was one of the first to identify the opportunity on the edge and that trend is accelerating in a post-COVID world,” HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri said in a statement. “With this acquisition, we are accelerating our edge-to-cloud strategy to provide a true distributed cloud model and cloud experience for all applications and data wherever they live. Silver Peak’s innovative equipment and technology bring critical capabilities that will help our customers modernize and transform their networks to securely connect any edge to any cloud. “
HPE will combine Silver Peak’s SD-WAN technology with Aruba, HPE’s network subsidiary, which was recently named a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for data centers and cloud networks.
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Silver Peak, which received a five-star rating in CRN’s 2020 Partner Program Guide, has been a lifelong player in the SD-WAN space with more than 1,500 SD-WAN clients in production worldwide. . The Santa Clara, California-based company’s SD-WAN will power Aruba’s Edge services platform by uniting Silver Peak SD-WAN with Aruba’s SD-Branch solutions in one move to help customers simplify deployments of branch offices and WANs to empower remote workers and enable distributed enterprises connected to the cloud.
“Today’s announcement comes at a unique time for our customers, who are grappling with business recovery from 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 businesses seek to extend connectivity to branch offices and enable secure work-from-home experiences. Silver Peak’s technology transforms legacy WAN architectures into standalone WANs, seamlessly fitting in with Aruba’s cloud native Edge Services platform. Together, we will be able to meet these needs with critical connectivity, security and artificial intelligence capabilities to drive the next generation of Edge-to-Cloud transformation. “
In a recent interview with CRN, Aruba’s Melkote said that the edge of the network and the data found at the edge is where the most powerful opportunities for companies and channel partners lie. “Data is not limited to data rooms as it was during the mainframe era or on our computers, and the new normal will be even more widespread than that. [Data] is to enter all the places where we live, work and play. We call this the edge, ”he told CRN. “It is an exciting place.”
The SD-WAN market is expected to grow from $ 2.3 billion in 2020 to nearly $ 5 billion in 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent, according to 650 Group.
Silver Peak helps businesses and service providers migrate to ensure enterprise-grade SD-WAN connectivity, while dramatically improving application performance and reducing connectivity costs, according to Silver Peak. Powered by Silver Peak’s SD-WAN edge platform, customers can achieve dedicated, WAN-like performance while running all cloud applications and services through broadband access.
Silver Peak, founded in 2004, said it allows freedom of choice to take advantage of best-in-class technologies from a wide range of ecosystem partners, particularly those focused on security.
David Hughes, founder and CEO of Silver Peak, said that the combination of Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN solutions with Aruba’s network portfolio offers an “unprecedented opportunity” to offer business-driven solutions to customers.
“The Silver Peak and Aruba teams share a common vision and goal to provide simplicity, scalability, and insight into edge applications,” Hughes said in a statement. “With Aruba’s extensive market launch, we will further accelerate our ability to drive faster adoption of these transformative technologies.”
HPE expects to close the Silver Peak deal in the fourth quarter of its 2020 fiscal year.
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