By Jason Gintert, CTO

 

The Sphere in Vegas is cool!

To kick things off, attending my first HPE Discover was pretty amazing. Beyond the visual spectacle of seeing my first event in the Sphere, the networking announcements were really interesting, particularly the Aruba Central Agentic AI Mesh.

To me, this didn’t seem like the usual “AI washing” we see from vendors lately. HPE has built a sophisticated multi-agent orchestrator (MAO) that coordinates specialized AI agents under a supervisory framework. Think of it as having a team of expert network engineers working 24/7, each focused on specific aspects of your network. The platform processes over one million daily telemetry points from 250,000+ customers, enabling predictive insights that would be impossible with traditional approaches.

The Aruba Central AI Copilot leverages data from 6 million devices globally and 3 billion clients in their data lake. The multi-agent architecture includes specialized agents for everything from documentation analysis to real-time network state monitoring, bug database access and even Salesforce integration for case notes.

During live demos, I watched it perform root cause analysis on application latency issues in real-time, showing its reasoning process for 10-20 seconds before delivering not just the problem (bandwidth contract violations), but three remediation options: execute now, schedule for later, or queue for the next maintenance window. That’s the difference between AI that sounds good in a keynote and AI that actually reduces 3am phone calls.

What caught my attention during the technical sessions was how the Agentic AI operates through two personas: AI Driven Autonomous and Copilot modes. This dual approach is unique in that it allows organizations to gradually transition from assisted to fully autonomous network operations. So you can start with the copilot making recommendations, build trust and eventually let it handle incremental remediation autonomously. Pretty cool.

It’s Agentic!!!

While everyone was talking agentic AI (and I mean EVERYONE was talking about it), I spent some quality time with the CX 10040 switches on the show floor. These guys are purpose built for the demanding requirements of datacenter and campus workloads with their integrated DPUs integrating security and network services. For those of us who’ve been waiting for the promise of integrating per flow controls into the network since the OpenFlow SDN era, the promise is coming closer to reality.

New Wi-Fi 7 access points with enhanced IoT capabilities (Bluetooth Low Energy 5.4 and 802.15.4/Zigbee radios) show HPE is thinking beyond just faster speeds. These new models open up fascinating possibilities for edge computing and sensor integration that we’re just beginning to explore.

The CX10040: 32 x 100G, 6 x 400G and 1.6Tbps of stateful firewall horsepower!

Just when I thought the week couldn’t get bigger, Thursday June 27th & Friday June 28th arrived with a one-two punch that left me a bit dazed.

First on Thursday, I saw the June 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure showing HPE (with Aruba and now Juniper) commanding 50% of the leader quadrant. The combined portfolio has effectively displaced other notable brands with some of them now making their way out of the leader quadrant, falling from traditional dominance.

Then on Friday, the Department of Justice finally settled and approved HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. I’ll admit, watching the networking community’s reaction (myself included) was entertaining as we’d been speculating about this for months. I think most thought we wouldn’t know more until mid-July when the DOJ trial was scheduled so it was a relief to many to see it wrapped up sooner.

As someone who’s been in this industry for coming on three decades, I can tell you what is happening today across all networking vendors, is a big shift in how enterprise networks will be built and operated.

The synergies between Aruba’s campus expertise plus Juniper’s AIOps, data center and WAN capabilities, not to mention the new Agentic AI platforms create something genuinely new. I’ll be anxiously awaiting the integration plan to see how it lines up with what partners and customers are hoping for and have been since the marriage was initially announced in January of 2024.

What HPE Networking appears to be creating can potentially be a unified, intelligent infrastructure that changes the economics of network operations. That is, if they can stay focused and avoid the pitfalls that has tripped up many a company their collective size, comprised of different companies and cultures all mushed together.

HPE Networking is accumulating a stockpile of interesting assets. The AI agentic mesh, the network infrastructure built for distributed/integrated security, the Gartner MQ validation, the shear wealth of networking riches in the portfolio and the Juniper acquisition are all coming together like coordinated, planned series of moves. Like in sports, they are assembling a “Dream Team”. Let’s see if HPE Networking can capitalize on these moves during their championship window. Because if they can execute, they have a good shot at the title.