What do you think of HPE’s acquisition of Silver Peak?
It was inevitable that players without the WAN component would be adding them on. We‘ve seen a succession with that -- first with Cisco, then with VMware and later, Palo Alto Networks. Now, HPE has Silver Peak and Silver Peak is considered to be a strong player. I can‘t say that they are the last play around -- there’s still some left. There are 69 vendors in this space, and it cannot accommodate that many, so consolidation was inevitable. If you look at the players that are left, HPE and Palo Alto and other folks on the acquisition spree know they need to have a complete offering because that is what the market is demanding -- you can’t just have a piece of it. And secondly, this market is growing very rapidly so you can’t afford to not be in the market because the base offerings are not growing so fast. If you look at HPE’s base offering in the wireless space, it’s not growing rapidly and if you look at silver Peak’s in the WAN optimization space, that’s not growing so rapidly, either. But Silver Peak has been able to pivot into the SD-WAN market with some degree of success and that was attractive to HPE -- it’s filling a portion of their portfolio they didn’t have.
