CRN Exclusive: Former Aruba CEO On How The New HP Networking Business Stacks Up Against The Competition

HP-Aruba: Mor e Than Jus t Competin g With Cisco

When HP earlier this year unveiled its huge, $3 billion acquisition of wireless network and security vendor Aruba, the industry's first thoughts were about HP's expanding its rivalry with Cisco. Yet if you listen to Dominic Orr, CEO of Aruba and now senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking, the acquisition is much more than a competitive play. Instead, HP has the potential to combine its traditional wired data center and desktop networking business with Aruba's focus on wireless networking and the security that goes with it to create an organization with a truly end-to-end networking offering -- spanning hardware, software, security, management and operations, all of which will be tied to software-defined networking.

Orr sat down with CRN to discuss how HP and Aruba have come together in a major networking play, how networking cabled infrastructure will not go away even as SDN gains dominance, and how the new HP Networking business stacks up against the competition (read: Cisco).

For a look at the future of HP Networking, and to learn what the word "ensumerization" means, turn the page and look into the mind of Dominic Orr.

You have used the term "Gen Mobile." Not Gen X. Not Gen Y. Gen Mobile. What is it, and what does it mean for networking and wireless going forward?

Traditionally, people delineate between the work environment and the home and entertainment environment, and they segregate the methods, the devices and the technologies in each environment. Nowadays, with mobile technology, and the mobile-first, cloud-first world, we have a new generation of workers that come into the workforce [who] are not used to basically desk-bound client-server technology. The only technology they know is the technology they got used to in their personal lives, and they bring it into the work environment. Sometimes I use the term "ensumerization," the enterprise application of consumer technology.

Ensumerization. You're going to change the whole dictionary on us, aren't you?

The idea is that now, with the same set of devices, and same set of technologies, [users] can actually handle what they want to do in their personal lives and in their work lives interchangeably. The question is, how do you do that in this day and age where compliance to cybersecurity is getting more and more important. [This forces] us all to revisit how to lay out the workplace, how you redefine the boundary of security for the corporation, and how you enable this new workforce, which is going to be increasingly a more important part of the working community, to be able to exert the productivity they want and yet make sure the enterprise data is not compromised.

So how does ensumerization or Gen Mobile play into the kind of things that HP-Aruba or the networking business in general have to take into account in order to build for this?

Basically, networks have to get smarter and smarter, and they have to get smarter at the edge of the network. And you have to have network management and policy management technology and platforms that can help corporations to dynamically manage such environments without exerting an undue cost in retraining the workforce. Through the combination of technologies like Aruba's ClearPass and HP's software-defined network platform for protecting the access layer of the network, we have the whole suite of solutions that allow an enterprise to basically dynamically take the desk of the employee to the nearest coffee shop, to the kitchen, to the airport, [in order to] enable that cloud-based, mobile-first application method and yet constantly monitor the security of the network.

So you're talking about putting additional intelligence at the edge of the network. How does one do that? What are the changes that have to be taken into account.

That's a concept we call "mobility context." … Mobility context is constantly knowing a packet is associated with certain sessions, and sessions are associated with the originator who is a known user, with a certain role, that the device that the traffic comes from we know is owned by the enterprise, vs. BYO. We also know the geo-location of the origin of the traffic, including time of day, day of week. And on top of that, with the application ID, using that as a context switching [to] shift all the traffic redirection and routing to basically the application layer. And let the traditional layer 2, layer 3 network focus on very speedily and reliably pushing packets. Everything else is constructed and controlled at the access layer.

You have been presenting a consistent message about the importance of mobility and networking for years. So why is it important for Aruba to be part of HP instead of doing it on your own?

[A few years ago, we found] the introduction of 11ac and 11ac Wave 2 technology was a very pivotal moment for access networks. That reason is that, with 11ac, finally you have an access method that allows wireless to be faster than wired, and cover a longer distance than wired. ...

Any time you have such a dramatic change in technology, that is where market shares change hands. If you have relatively stable incremental technology improvements, market share is normally kind of [stable]. But when you have such a jump, if you have good technology, the key thing to gaining market share is an increase in your go-to-market bandwidth. And Aruba has been very successful in several verticals.

(Why Aruba needed HP, continued)

I used to say that, when we first started in the industry, we were kind of the fries and the switching vendors were the burgers. But now, with 11ac, there's a switching of the role, and we are becoming the burger. Customers still need the fries. In fact, they need the whole complete Happy Meal. So we need software, we need wireless, we need wired, we need the core layer, and then we need services to wrap around it. And Aruba has the best burger. So we're looking at partners to allow us to, first, very effectively lead us to access to the CIO level to fight for the bigger battles, and to complete the Happy Meal. ...

So that's a unique opportunity that this merger allows.

The merger between HP and Aruba has closed. How far has the integration come? How closely integrated is Aruba with HP?

The integration was relatively easy because we are combining the workforces to attack three markets. One is this mobile-first access layer of the enterprise. HP traditionally also had a good momentum in the SMB market through what they used to call the ProCurve offering. That's an area not overlapping much with Aruba. Aruba is all about large campus, large enterprise. And HP has a very sophisticated data center offering in either independent switching in the converged and super-converged systems in the data center inside the rack. So all those activities are now under my management. Most of the integration work is ready on the enterprise side. The data center is pretty much HP standalone. On the SMB side, we will inject Aruba Instant, which is our low-end product line, into the SMB.

So you went from running Aruba, which was completely focused on wireless networking and security, to now also running HP's wired networking business. What's the future of wired networking?

I think it's gonna be big. The wireless access layer is going to be the dominant user-facing technology. But everybody knows wireless traffic needs to be back-hauled by wired [networks], just like the mobile phone system is not everything end-to-end wireless. It's only the first hop we're talking about.

So a coordinated deployment -- particularly in the software-defined network software, the management software, and the control software, [with] the wired and wireless components -- is very important. The mobility part is actually end-to-end. It actually starts out with the user and the device and gets into the access network. And actually a lot of the context that I mentioned about the user and the application, ... we see more and more a need to tie that all the way through to the data center for you to coordinate a very effective mobile application delivery to the user.

How does software-defined networking play together with the wireless networking and security that Aruba has worked on?

With the introduction of VM [virtual machine] technology and pooling of servers, fundamentally the dynamic assignment of applications on virtual machines, and the dynamic assignment of virtual machines to physical machines, is constantly causing a reconfiguration of the physical network boundary. And so, fundamentally, people say, it gets to the point where people say the deployment of those physical boundaries is becoming the bottleneck for the deployment of the virtual entities.

And so, therefore, you say, why don't we decouple it? You can build a very solid physical infrastructure that will dynamically use software-defined networking to map the different mobile virtual servers to the physical entities. And that is really driving SDN in the data center.

(How SDN fits with Aruba's wireless networking and security technology, continued.)

The reverse problem is happening at the access network [where the concept of the desk] is disappearing because people hardly sit at their desks. And so the idea there is just like the VM mobility problem: The physical desktop devices are [becoming] irrelevant. ...

And so suddenly you are saying, "I still have physical entities like my server, like my printer, like my desktop phone, like my projector, that still need to stay in the physical network. But increasingly the user aspect of my traffic, which is related to the mobile devices, are roaming around too fast for me to map." And the worker types -- contractor vs. guest vs. customer vs. employee -- are shifting around so much that I need to dynamically map the access characteristics to the physical ones just like in the data center. And therefore, in a mirror-symmetric manner, we basically are saying that we need the mapping to use software to define the network boundary.

Who are some of your key competitors, and how are they positioned against Aruba and each other?

We have actually, even in the past few years, only really had one competitor, particularly now with the combined portfolio. And you probably know who it is.

(Note: For anyone who has not guessed it yet, that competitor is Cisco.)

So how do you say your portfolio compares to that of that competitor that you really don't want to name?

Fundamentally, the difference is focus. And the difference is, architecturally, we are open system. They are end-to-end. I have the full product line of software, wireless, access networking, data center. We advocate that, among the four product lines, best in class, customers can choose one of the four [if they want].

There are some incremental benefits of choosing an end-to-end system. But ... if you look at it, the history of Hewlett-Packard, and the history of Aruba, we always have been advocating standards-based.

And we were always "mobile-first." Our competitor is still coming a bit more from the desktop and adding wireless.

As a corollary to that, you said "open" is one of the differentiators. Define what you mean by open.

Basically, you can choose our wireless LAN and somebody else's wired infrastructure. You can choose our network management platform, AirWave, to manage any other [company's] wireless. You can choose our ClearPass policy management system and our wired infrastructure and use [somebody else's] wireless. The functionality that we provide does not drop.

[With] our competitors, if you want a policy management system, they assume that you will have every component of that policy management system sphere of operation made by them. Which, philosophically, fundamentally, we don't think is the right thing for the customer.

What do you need from your channel partners to do this?

I think the industry is due for a skills refresh. Traditionally, network engineers have been trained on how to set up access control lists and VLANs on switches and routers. And that's absolutely required at the lower level. Now we need an additional new set of skills [to provide the] ability to design high-density, high-noise environment wireless infrastructures. We need a workforce that understands mobile device management, mobile application and data protection. ...

I think if there's one initiative that we will be very much involved [in] with our channel partners, [it's] to upgrade the skill sets of our community. In Aruba, we sometimes frivolously call this community the "Airheads." I think the Airheads community is going to be very, very crucial to deploying this vision of mobile-first, cloud-first access layer network for Gen Mobile.