What an exciting morning at the Hive! First let’s take a moment to congratulate our friends over at Aruba Networks. This is a very small valley. We all have friends at many of the competing companies, and it’s always nice to see friends do well. While not an outcome Aerohive is targeting, let’s hope it works out for them. One thing for sure is that HP’s acquisition of Aruba validates what we’ve always known - wireless is an integral part of any networking solution, and a wireless solution is required in order to remain competitive in the market.
With that said, there’s always some bad along with the good, and I’ve taken a moment to lay out some food for thought for Aruba’s customers, partners, and any one else directly impacted by today’s acquisition news.
WLAN vendor acquisitions are difficult to say the least.
This is HP’s third attempt at acquiring a solution - they’ve already got Colubris and H3C in their line up without much success. As we’ve seen with Juniper/Trapeze, Zebra/Motorola, and even Cisco/Meraki - there is a huge amount of disruption as the acquiring company tries to balance the competing solutions within the portfolio.
What does this mean for Aruba’s solution?
Aruba was one of the leaders in the Enterprise Wi-Fi marketplace, with much of their revenue tied to their controller-based WLAN business. They also have various other offerings in their portfolio, mainly the Instant branch office solution, their ClearPass authentication management solution, and their struggling line of controller-based switches. These product portfolios, and more importantly future R&D, now need to get rationalized against all of the other product lines and investments that HP already offers.
Some will win, some won’t. The challenge for customers is to bet on the right ones.
What about the partnerships?
Aruba had several OEM relationships and partnerships they negotiated - including ones with Dell, Alcatel-Lucent, Brocade, and Juniper. All of these partners have competing portfolios with HP, and I suspect the relationship with Dell will be the most volatile due to this recent announcement. Dell not only fights for switch business with HP, but they’ve also spent a significant amount of money customizing the Aruba OEM software to fit into their portfolio.
Unless Dell and HP suddenly decide to become besties, this could result in some serious thrashing for customers who are waiting to see who will support their WLAN infrastructure solution.
What happens to the channel?
Aruba had a relatively strong channel partner line up, but many of them already offer switches as part of their portfolios. Aruba Channel partners may not be happy having to compete against the huge HP channel in products and services, as well as meeting the more stringent HP partnership requirements.
Past acquisitions like this have introduced us to some of our best channel partners :-).
What does this mean for Aerohive?
In the technology world, innovation and disruption are driven by the up-and-coming companies, not the behemoths. We think Aerohive is well situated to be an even bigger player in the Enterprise WLAN marketplace. Our core differentiators allow us to offer our customers a complete enterprise solution whether they need a half dozen APs or tens of thousands of access points, routers, and switches – same architecture, same management, one platform for innovation.
Our focus on the cloud and applications platform further position us to compete broadly across the market from the very smallest of enterprises through to the largest corporations and school districts in the world.
The opportunities presented by the uncertainty of the rest of the players in the market give us a chance to really show the world that Aerohive is here to stay, and we will continue to focus on our controller-less, cloud-enabled mobility solutions that offer our customers the best, most cost-effective, and powerful connectivity in the world :-).
Hive On!