HPE Aruba Networking Executive Overview with James Robertson

Hello everybody and welcome. It's, uh, really great to be with everyone today. Um, looking forward to, to bringing some, hopefully some very interesting stuff to you over the next couple of hours.

So, uh, my goal here is to really kind of kick it off, um, but I want to kind of just highlight our agenda. We've split up into four kind of key components today. We're gonna be talking about our AI ops capabilities in Aruba Central and the advances that we've been doing there.

We're gonna roll into some switching, give you an idea about what the advances that we've been seeing in our switching portfolio and what we are capable of doing now across the HPE wider portfolio using our switching products. We're gonna talk about wireless and there's gonna be a lot of show and tell, uh, with the wireless. I know Jared's gonna bring that, uh, to us.

And then finally, we're gonna be talking about security. Obviously underpinned with zero trust and what that really means for you. So I think hopefully that's a good agenda.

Hopefully you'll get something out of it, each one of these sections. So I wanted to start with kind of laying the groundwork of what's really going on in our industry. And I know you guys are probably very aware of that, but there's really these two big sea changes that we are seeing right now.

The first one really being this idea of how are we gonna handle, uh, what we call AI ops, right? Basically AI for networking and what that really means and how are we driving to help the efficiency and effectiveness of networks. But then the more interesting one over the next few years that we are gonna start to roll into is really this idea of networking for ai.

And to me that's gonna be a new foundation that we're gonna be able to see kind of appearing in data centers around the globe going forward as we start to empower these AI workloads using this underpinning of networking infrastructure. So this is really kind of important work that we think we're doing across the HP Aruba networking portfolio to really drive these two big things across HPE. And it really starts from a fundamental understanding of data.

If you don't have a lot of data feeding this idea of AI ops, then you are missing the visibility. So I like to say it's like trying to drive down the road in a rainstorm without your wipers going. You may just about be able to stay on the road, but you're missing pieces and parts, right?

That potentially can cause some problems. So by gathering as much data as we possibly can, and this is what we've really been focusing on, uh, within HPE Aruba networking, we are able to collate it into a single data lake. And that single data lake allows us to examine that data in all kinds of different ways to truly unpack the value of that data and bring it to life to create, to create new efficiencies and understanding of us of what's really happening in the infrastructure.

And so that's allowed us to really kind of focus on three core components, bringing security first, AI powered networking to life, leaning in from a point of view that security is driven by this Telemetry and understanding of what's really happening in the network using the power of AI to further understand that data set, that we have our disposal to ex extract those needles in a haystack of understanding that we are missing because we are humans and a machine can look at this data in much more deeper meaningful ways. And then finally using the power of network to truly empower new ways of using the infrastructure, right, to really kind of create the right environment that drives the experiences that we really need. All of these things working together, again, underpinned by this power of telemetry.

This data that we've collected really is the heart of everything that we are doing. And so at Discover we really talked about three big differences in the Aruba portfolio compared to others. First one being full stack across our infrastructure.

Now across every component, everything is underpinned by Aruba Central. So it doesn't matter if you're wired, wireless wan, it doesn't matter whether you're worried about the campus or the cloud, it's all within Aruba Central. Very powerful single point of view.

We've also expanded this idea of how we deploy because one of the problems when we all moved as a, as an industry into the world of cloud managed infrastructure is that a lot of organizations said, I can't go there. I can't go into the cloud. I need to be able to deploy on prem or near prem or somewhere else that is in my control.

And so we've taken the underpinnings of Aruba Central and now allow it to deploy in any environment that we can possibly imagine, including what we call sovereign environments, where there needs to be an air gap solution because of the needs of a particular industry. And then finally, observability again, one of the things that we lost as we all move to the cloud was the issue around how do we see across our entire state of infrastructure. The cloud allowed us to empower our own products, right?

And look at those products. But through the power of what we've got within the HPE portfolio with a capability called Ops Ramp, a company that HP acquired a few years ago, we're now able to have observability that looks at the entire estate all the way from security, networking, virtualized platforms and storage all under one view. And of course, all that telemetry can add to that equation about what's going on in the infrastructure and empower the AI model in even more deeper meaningful ways.

So we believe that we have created truly the the right environment at the right time to allow infrastructure to really come into its own. And of course, this is really part of the AI journey and it wasn't lost on me that we mentioned 2019, Back in 2019, we were all dealing with kind of what we would call traditional ai. It's kind of funny to say traditional AI only six years afterwards, right?

But the ability to take a data set and look at it, look at it for anomalies, look at it for interesting points of view, and process it using kind of computer based machine learning. And in 2024, just last year, we stepped that game up to get to really generative ai, right? Being able to take a larger data set, more understanding more um, of documents and points of view, allowing that to then make a decision or make an understanding of what's really happening in the infrastructure, right?

Based on knowledge that it has already accumulated. And then in 2025, just a couple of weeks ago, we announced a gent ai. So a gent AI really becomes the idea of reasoning.

So not only now do I have all that generative AI data at my disposal, but now I'm able to look at what's really happening right then in the moment on the infrastructure just like a human would and go, okay, based on my knowledge base plus what I'm seeing, this is what I believe is happening, this is what I should be doing to react to it. That's how we all work, right? We take the knowledge that we've accumulated and apply that to the situation we're currently in.

So that's exactly what we've done with Agen. And of course all this is underpinned by Aruba Central, which you're gonna hear a lot more about in a second, which really is this idea of fundamentally that we are trying to connect everything we possibly can, trying to protect absolutely anything that's running around the infrastructure, right? Where all the network components are participating in the overall security of the infrastructure, using that telemetry to help drive decisions.

And then of course to automate so that we're able to give back to the network operations team, right? So they get the true understanding of what the network's doing moment by mobile.