We attended primarily the Atmosphere Track of the Discover partner conference in Las Vegas, where HPE Aruba Networking announced significant new developments. Among the new technology announcements were Private 5G radios, Observability-related integrations, IoT Gateway enhancements, and SASE. Of course, we attended HPE CEO Antonio Neri’s keynote at the Las Vegas Sphere. For reference, his presentation was the first-ever corporate presentation at the brand-new Sphere entertainment facility, where HPE also invited NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang to discuss the two companies’ visions for how the AI computing industry will develop.
HPE Aruba Networking shared a key measure of its devices-under-management statistics: the company’s AI Networking system now boasts 4M networking devices and 1 billion client devices connected to its Data Lake. The point of sharing these counts is that there is a general acknowledgment that AI networking’s capabilities improve with the square power of devices managed and that the HPE installed base is impressive. On a related matter, HPE Aruba Networking is in the final stages of previewing integrations with its recently acquired OpsRamp capabilities, which enable what HPE executive David Hughes calls Observability. We are very encouraged to hear that the HPE networking team is moving forward with developments that take advantage of the telemetry from the millions of devices managed by HPE’s software and services systems. We wouldn’t be surprised to see HPE Aruba Networking continue to push the Observability theme more in 2024.
Regarding Wi-Fi, HPE Aruba Networking announced IoT Gateway enhancements, Dynamic Application Prioritization, Expanded Wi-Fi 7 and 6 GHz offerings, and Hybrid cloud-optimized gateways. In addition, the 650 Group team participated in two separate on-stage presentations during the conference. The first related to AI Networking (Chris DePuy and Alan Weckel shared the stage for this presentation on Tuesday). We discussed the nearly $100B networking and network security-related end-market opportunity that the HPE Aruba Networking team will participate in in five years. In addition, we highlighted how the AI Networking sub-segment of this total market is expected to grow at a 5-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 40%. One of the primary themes of this presentation is how important it is for resellers to develop expertise with cloud-managed services and AI Networking to participate in this high-growth AI Networking trend. For the second of 650 Group’s on-stage presentations, Chris DePuy was a panelist with two of HPE Aruba Networking’s pioneering resellers (Mike Caruso of NWN Carousel and Justin Hardisty of GDT) who specialize in offering Network as a Service (NaaS). Chris highlighted HPE Aruba Networking’s market share lead in Vendor-based NaaS, and he emphasized that if vendors and resellers don’t participate in NaaS, they won’t experience a growing total addressable market in the networking market.
