HPE lives on the edge by dropping nearly $1 billion on Silver Peak

Enterprise tech company HPE wants to do a better job of connecting its customers to the network edge and reckons the acquisition of SD-WAN specialist Silver Peak will help.

The price of all this edgy goodness is $925 million. Silver Peak will be chucked into the same silo as Aruba, which was acquired for $3 billion back in 2015, just before the great HPE/HP Inc schism. The fact that we’re still talking about Aruba is an achievement, given HP’s record of catastrophic acquisitions, such as EDS, Palm and Autonomy, so maybe it has decided networking is the area it’s least bad at.

“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 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.”

“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 HPE 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.”

“Bringing together Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN solutions with Aruba’s industry leading networking portfolio provides an unprecedented opportunity to deliver a 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.”

Hughes apparently didn’t get the memo about tenuously relating the move to the coronavirus pandemic, which isn’t a great start. Just as well it looks like the Aruba guy will be doing most of the public speaking from now on. HP wants to help its customers move their data from every edge to any cloud, so this acquisition makes sense on paper. Now let’s see what they do with it.