New integration with OpsRamp, a company HPE acquired in 2023, adds interesting new capabilities to HPE Aruba Central.
HPE Aruba Networking is doing well, we hear from Larry Lunetta. He is VP of AI, Security and Networking Product Marketing at HPE. We speak to him following today’s announcement that HPE Aruba Networking Central (from here on out, Aruba Central) is getting an integration with OpsRamp. Aruba Central experienced tremendous growth between March and August of this year. Lunetta shows a chart showing that the number of network products Aruba Central now manages grew 38 percent in those five months to about 4.7 million. The number of endpoints that Aruba Central now serves through these network products has grown by an even more impressive 156 percent to about 1.6 billion.
Seeing the above figures, our first question is obviously where this tremendous growth is coming from. The lion’s share, Lunetta says, is not so much entirely new customers for HPE Aruba, it is mostly organizations that have switched from the company’s legacy on-prem solution to Aruba Central.
Of course, for HPE Aruba, it would have been very nice if they had all been new customers. Yet the move from the controller-based environment to Aruba Central also certainly sends a very positive message. Apparently, the cloud platform has become so good and compelling that many organizations are confident enough to make the switch, even though there will undoubtedly also have been the necessary extra focus from sales. Furthermore, HPE Aruba has also spent a lot of time redesigning Aruba Central, starting with the network topology and now implemented more broadly.
Whatever the exact reason for the massive switch, it is undoubtedly good news for HPE Aruba. “This exponential growth has big implications,” Lunetta points out. More devices also means more data that HPE Aruba can use to further improve Aruba Central. HPE Aruba trains the proprietary LLMs it uses for Aruba Central on a proprietary datalake, which means more data is now coming in. He talks about an “AI data effect,” drawing a parallel with the network effect. Just as a network becomes exponentially more valuable with more users, he sees the same for a datalake like the one HPE Aruba uses.
All in all, Lunetta sees that Aruba Central has now truly gained “critical mass.” In other words, the growth will probably maintain for a while. More data means more insights means more useful features and, in turn, ultimately means more users. That, at least, is the theory.
Integrating OpsRamp into Aruba Central
In itself, it is quite interesting that Aruba Central is growing so fast. Yet as far as we’re concerned, that’s not the most interesting thing HPE Aruba has to report today. That is the integration of OpsRamp into Aruba Central. With this, HPE Aruba is taking another step in the right direction in terms of AIOps.
Thanks to the integration of OpsRamp, Aruba Central can now look beyond its own world. That is, it can also retrieve observability data from non-HPE Aruba equipment. This includes equipment from Cisco, Juniper and Palo Alto, among others. In a nutshell, HPE Aruba now uses the OpsRamp engine within Aruba Central. OpsRamp is fundamentally agnostic and has put a lot of work into developing that engine. That can obviously do more than just the standard SNMP stuff that anyone can do with any network sniffer.
The integration between OpsRamp and Aruba Central can be explained in several ways. On the one hand, since the acquisition last year, it was bound to happen. After all, why would HPE acquire an ITOM player (of which observability is a part) such as OpsRamp and then not maximize its impact?
On the other hand, there must be a market for it. That is, there are apparently enough environments where not all equipment is from the same manufacturer. That makes sense, too, of course. Organizations often continue to grow, either organically or after acquisitions. Then it is not surprising to have multiple network manufacturers present. In addition, HPE Aruba doesn’t offer everything in its own portfolio either. It does not have a firewall, for example, but would like to be able to monitor it from an AIOps perspective. When the Juniper Networks acquisition is through, HPE Aruba will have firewalls. Of course, those will still be from another manufacturer for the time being.
All in all, we think the integration of OpsRamp into Aruba Central is a good and useful move by HPE Aruba Networking. It makes Aruba Central, which is already going strong, a little more complete. It could even be an addition that makes Aruba Central grow a little bit harder. Organizations may find it an (additional) reason to move toward Aruba Central.