HPE Aruba Networking Executive Overview with James Robertson

James Robertson, VP & GM, kicked off the session by outlining HPE Aruba Networking’s focus on two significant industry shifts: AI for networking (AI-powered NetOps) and networking for AI. The former aims to enhance network efficiency and effectiveness using AI, while the latter is positioned as a new foundational infrastructure for AI workloads in data centers. He emphasized the critical role of data collection as the foundation for AI operations, explaining that a comprehensive data lake, fed by extensive telemetry from across the network, is essential for gaining true visibility and extracting actionable insights. This data-driven approach underpins their strategy to deliver security-first, AI-powered networking, leveraging machine learning to identify anomalies that humans might miss and to create an infrastructure that drives optimal user experiences.

Robertson highlighted three key differentiators for the Aruba portfolio. First, their full-stack integration means that all wired, wireless, and WAN components, whether on campus or in the cloud, are managed through Aruba Central, providing a single pane of glass for comprehensive visibility. Second, HPE Aruba Networking has expanded its deployment options beyond cloud-managed solutions, now supporting on-premise, near-premise, and sovereign (air-gapped) environments to meet diverse organizational needs. Third, they address the challenge of broad observability across the entire IT estate through the integration of OpsRamp, an HPE-acquired company. OpsRamp provides a unified view across security, networking, virtualized platforms, and storage, enriching the telemetry data fed into their AI models for deeper insights.

He further elaborated on HPE Aruba Networking’s AI journey, distinguishing between traditional AI (anomaly detection based on historical data), generative AI (leveraging larger datasets for decision-making and understanding), and the recently announced Agent AI. Agent AI, the latest advancement, focuses on reasoning, allowing the system to combine accumulated knowledge with real-time infrastructure data to proactively identify issues and suggest actions, mimicking human problem-solving. This entire AI framework is underpinned by Aruba Central, which fundamentally aims to connect and protect all infrastructure components, utilizing telemetry for security decisions and automating operations to provide network teams with real-time insights and control.