Intro to HPE Self-Driving Networks with Sanjoy Dey

Sanjoy Dey of HPE Networking introduced the company’s campus and branch switching portfolio and its vision of self-driving networks. He outlined the AI-native, cloud-native, and secure-by-design foundations shared by Mist and Aruba Central, along with six tenets guiding the switching roadmap, from agentic switching and zero trust LAN to always-on operations and the combined Juniper EX and Aruba CX lines. Dey, who leads HPE’s campus and branch wired business, delivered this opening session at Networking Field Day 41, setting up later segments on segmentation, platform innovations, and automation.

Dey framed self-driving networks as a correction to decades of switch design focused on speeds, feeds, and capacity, which left operators doing the heavy lifting of gathering forensic evidence, configuring SPAN ports, and taking packet captures whenever something broke. In HPE’s model, the network understands the user experience and remediates problems itself within guardrails set by engineers and architects. He described the three pillars behind both Mist and Aruba Central. AI native means bringing petabytes of telemetry from clients and network elements into the cloud for AI models to act on. Cloud native refers to a microservices architecture that scales from a few branch switches to campuses with tens of thousands of devices, exposed through REST APIs, WebSockets, webhooks, and MCP endpoints. Secure by design covers primitives that contain threats at the point where a device connects.

The six tenets show where HPE is taking the portfolio. Agentic switching explores where intelligence should live across the cloud, the operating system, and custom or merchant silicon. HPE also promised evolution rather than revolution, with no forced overhauls of existing architectures, and applied that to zero trust, which Dey called widely misunderstood and which HPE intends to deliver without replacing standard topologies or overlay fabrics. An always-on tenet targets change management through hitless upgrades, fast boot, and perpetual PoE. The final tenet is the breadth of the combined Juniper EX and Aruba CX lines, from simple branch access to core and distribution, with Mist and Aruba Central providing the intelligence that turns hardware choice into a single self-driving operation.