Hewlett Packard Enterprise celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, and the company’s recent Discover annual user and partner conference in Las Vegas served as a showcase for its past decade of accomplishments, as well as the ten-year anniversary of its acquisition of Aruba in 2015. The event also served as the debut for HPE’s new brand mark, refreshing a stodgy and text-heavy logo by incorporating a variation on Hewlett Packard’s iconic green badge that is meant to appear open to the future.
HPE’s future is decidedly agentic in its focus, as evidenced by Discover’s overall theme and the race for the company and other IT infrastructure providers to capitalize on the already lucrative and potentially transformative opportunity in enabling modern AI for enterprises at scale. A handful of the company’s AI-infused announcements at the event were especially noteworthy. And while I like what HPE is doing, I believe that it can improve upon some of its efforts to further its AI-for-networking and networking-for-AI ambitions. With that context set, let’s dive in.
The Promise Of HPE Aruba Networking’s Agentic AI Mesh
Enterprises are faced with daunting networking challenges today, as outlined by Aruba’s chief product officer David Hughes in his technical keynote on day three of the conference. Hughes pointed to the simultaneous needs to support demanding users who expect zero downtime, to enable IT teams to do more with less, to protect organizations from escalating cyber threats, to mitigate ongoing geopolitical risks that threaten business continuity and data protection, and to ease management tied to multi-vendor and multi-domain operations.
The company aims to address these needs with its new Agentic AI Mesh offering from HPE Aruba Networking. At preview, it includes a pool of fifteen purpose-built agents and an orchestration super-agent, complemented by a networking copilot. The networking agentic AI functionality integrated into HPE Aruba Networking’s Central control console is designed to broadly automate network functionality. Over time, this should facilitate easier root cause analysis, help remediate issues quickly and ultimately deliver a self-healing capability.
