Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Silver Peak in a transaction valued at $925 million. Silver Peak will be combined with HPE’s Aruba business unit and will extend Aruba’s technology capabilities in the large and fast-growing SD-WAN space. Silver Peak has more than 1,500 production SD-WAN customers around the world. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of HPE’s fiscal year 2020, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
“HPE was an early mover in identifying the opportunity at the edge and that trend is accelerating in a post-COVID world,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “With this acquisition we are accelerating our edge-to-cloud strategy to provide a true distributed cloud model and cloud experience for all apps and data wherever they live. Silver Peak’s innovative team and technology bring critical capabilities that will help our customers modernize and transform their networks to securely connect any edge to any cloud.”
Silver Peak’s SD-WAN are seen by HPE to be complementary to and strengthen Aruba’s Edge Service Platform (ESP). HPE hopes that “by combining Silver Peak’s SD-WAN with Aruba’s SD-Branch solutions, customers can simplify branch office and WAN deployments to empower remote workforces, enable cloud-connected distributed enterprises, and transform business operations without compromising quality or reliability.”
“Today’s announcement comes at a unique moment for our customers, who are grappling with business recovery in the wake of the pandemic,” said Keerti Melkote, president of Intelligent Edge for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and founder of Aruba Networks. “The need for edge-to-cloud architectures has never been more relevant as enterprises look to extend connectivity to branch locations and enable secure work-from-home experiences. Silver Peak’s technology transforms legacy WAN architectures to self-driving WANs, which is a perfect fit with Aruba’s cloud-native, AI-driven Edge Services Platform. Together, we will be able to meet these needs with critical connectivity, security, and AI capabilities to drive the next generation of Edge-to-Cloud transformation.”
“Bringing together Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN solutions with Aruba’s industry leading networking portfolio provides an unprecedented opportunity to deliver a comprehensive business-driven solutions to our customers,” said David Hughes, founder and CEO of Silver Peak. “The Silver Peak and Aruba teams share a common vision and goal to provide simplicity, scalability, and application-awareness at the edge. With Aruba’s extensive go-to-market, we will further accelerate our ability to drive faster adoption of these transformational technologies. We are excited for the opportunities we will have as a combined team to accelerate innovation in this fast-growing segment of the networking market.”
As applications continue to move to the cloud, remote working and mobile employees are on the rise, and billions of IoT devices are added to the network, the SD-WAN market is experiencing significant growth. That is expected to continue, with 650 Group forecasting that the market for SD-WAN will grow from $2.3B in 2020 to $4.9B in 2024, a +20.5% CAGR.
In 2018 HPE announced its strategic plan to invest $4 billion in Intelligent Edge over four years, and this investment is consistent with HPE’s core strategy focused on accelerating investments in areas of attractive, profitable growth including the Intelligent Edge.
The companies expect the combination to create opportunities for significant economic upside through enhanced growth and profitability by:
- Providing a superior value proposition to joint customers through integrated offerings that addresses a greater set of customer requirements
- Targeting an expanded TAM across SD-WAN and SD-Branch implementations
- Accelerating WAN transformations across HPE and Aruba’s broad global customer base
