Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s just-reported financial results have been actually fascinating and present continued progress, however that wasn’t essentially the most fascinating announcement HPE made Thursday.
Aruba, the networking division of HPE, announced its intent to amass Israel-based Axis Security Ltd., which is one among many suppliers of safe service edge, or SSE, available on the market as we speak. Axis got here to market with zero-trust community entry as a service however since then has added different core parts of SSE, together with cloud entry safety dealer, or CASB, and safe net gateway, or SWG. It additionally has digital expertise administration or DEM, which isn’t sometimes related to safety, however I imagine an essential a part of SSE.
Safety instruments see all visitors that runs throughout the community and use it to seek out threats. The identical visitors could be analyzed to grasp how purposes are performing with out having to deploy brokers. In early 2020, Zscaler launched its DEM answer, and since then others, resembling Netskope Inc. and Axis have adopted swimsuit. I’d wish to see Gartner make it a core element of the SSE Magic Quadrant to spotlight the significance of it.
The addition of Axis is very complementary to Aruba and HPE. The corporate has a powerful software-defined wide-area community answer from its acquisition of Silver Peak, which features a network-based firewall and dynamic segmentation. An increasing number of clients are on the lookout for a full answer for safe entry service edge, or SASE, which is the mix of SD-WAN and SSE. Previous to the acquisition, Aruba may ship SASE solely by means of a partnership however upon closing, can have its personal answer.
SSE is essential as we speak, because the shopping for movement for SASE modified by means of the pandemic. Previous to COVID-19, SASE shopping for was led by SD-WAN after which clients regarded to SSE to safe internet-based connectivity. However then the world modified, and companies moved staff from department places of work to their houses and SASE shopping for turned security-led as a result of there was a necessity to guard house staff. Now that firms are shifting to a hybrid work mannequin, it’s attainable the shopping for pendulum may swing again to network-first, however in both case Aruba can have an answer.
Though there are a number of SSE distributors, Axis ought to be an excellent match for Aruba. No buy value was given, although the reported quantity was underneath $500 million, which is small for an organization the scale of HPE. Axis has good expertise however has solely 150 folks, making it tough for it to scale up. HPE can take the expertise and drop it into its huge group, enabling Axis to scale.
From a company perspective, Axis is a software-as-a-service-based answer, which positively contributes to the shift to subscription income. Additionally, HPE’s major go-to-market mannequin is now the GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, and Axis Safety’s cloud-native platform ought to roll properly into it to allow clients to purchase SASE with a single month-to-month subscription.
This acquisition comes on the heels of HPE saying the purchase of Athonet, a supplier of LTE and 5G options. Previous to that, Aruba’s final main acquisition was Silver Peak in July 2020, which gave Aruba a stable SD-WAN providing. The hole in acquisitions is probably going the results of the management turnover as Aruba Chief Govt Keerti Melkote and Chief Expertise Officer Partha Narasimhan left inside months of one another. The 2 acquisitions in shut proximity are an indication that the Aruba group of HPE could also be revving up the mergers-and-acquisitions machine.
Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Analysis, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this text for SiliconANGLE.
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