How is the network transforming into an intelligent, secure, and self-optimizing powerhouse?
Discover the blueprint from HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025! Join industry analysts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead as they host a pivotal session with Phil Mottram, Executive Vice President and General Manager at HPE Aruba Networking. This focused exploration reveals how HPE Aruba Networking is empowering customers to optimize their networks through secure, flexible deployment, seamless management, and insight-driven automation.
Key takeaways include:
🔹AI for Network Mastery: Understand the dual role of AI within HPE Aruba Networking, highlighting the essential need for AI-ready infrastructure to support demanding applications and the strategic deployment of AI for profound network optimization, including advancements in Wi-Fi 7 APs and new switches.
🔹Security-First, AI-Powered Networking: Uncover the latest innovations launched at HPE Discover, including cutting-edge security features and the announcement of agentic AI mesh capabilities within HPE Aruba Networking Central, revolutionizing network management.
🔹Converging Security and Network Management: Explore the critical importance of a security-first approach in networking, emphasizing the industry trend toward a seamless convergence of security and network operations, underpinned by a built-in, layered, zero-trust strategy.
🔹Flexible Deployment & Automation: Learn how HPE Aruba Networking enables customers to achieve exceptional network flexibility through diverse deployment options and drives efficiency with advanced, insight-driven automation across their entire infrastructure.
Learn more at HPE.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road and we are live here at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas. Daniel, it’s been a great show so far and we’re pretty much talking about AI networking and hybrid cloud.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been a really powerful moment for HP and I think that’s really what they were hoping for. You know, they came out with these kind of big three priorities. Of course, networking kicked it off. We saw hybrid cloud getting some more focus and AI. And the interesting thing about the AI part is like AI, yes, has its own segments, but I keep saying AI was really deeply inundated in every part of the story, Was part of the hybrid cloud stories, part of the networking story. But I think they had a big moment and of course, deepening the partnership with Nvidia. That’s really important right now, Pat, but mission accomplished. I think it’s an appropriate time to use that particular phrase.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it is. And one of the things that I’m really happy with in the industry conversation is we finally got around to talking about the importance of networking related to AI. You and I were talking about this on the pod before. It’s like, well, wait a second. Scale up network, front end, back end network is all very important to modernize and of course on the edge. And I can’t imagine a better guy to talk about this than Phil at HPE. Phil, great to see you.
Phil Mottram: Yeah. Aruba Phil.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes, Aruba Phil.
Daniel Newman: I heard that was how you were set up in the. One of the earlier segments.
Phil Mottram: I was actually christened Aruba Phil. That’s good.
Daniel Newman: How’s that working out for you? And he runs Iron man, so he’s telling us that. So when he runs, it says on his back Aruba fill.
Phil Mottram: Correct.
Daniel Newman: But hopefully people are reading it on the back and not the other way around.
Phil Mottram: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: I don’t know about you, Pat, but I’m always one of those people that’s like, if I could even finish one, it knows what place you come into. So you heard us sort of set this thing up and networking is having its day and we talk a lot about the fact that yes, compute sort of is. Everyone wants to talk about compute, but in the end, the limitations of AI, so many of them sit on the network. And of course the other part of it is power. We can talk more about power. We’ll talk about that with other people. With you, of course. AI is the force. What does that mean though for the HP Aruba networking business?
Phil Mottram: Okay, yeah. So when we think about AI, we think about it as a coin. So two sides to the coin. One is AI for networking, and then the other one is networking for AI. Networking for AI is all about the kind of base infrastructure an enterprise would need to kind of roll out in order to deploy an AI service. And when we spot, when we speak to our customers about their AI deployments, they’re all really paranoid about the data and where the data is going to go because obviously they’re pushing proprietary data into these models, right? And what they don’t want is, you know, that gets out on the Internet or whatever it might be. So, we’re seeing lots of customers upgrade the network to more kinds of new technologies just to make sure that they’re kind of reducing the threat of any kind of security risk or whatever. So I think networking for AI translates into a big kind of investment upgrade opportunity for the end to end network. And then on the other side, we have AI for networking, which is all about the platform. So we have a platform called Aruba Central, which is part of HPE Greenlake. And what that allows customers to do is to be able to provision and manage their network. And we’ve been embedding many, many AI capabilities and features into that platform, and that’s moving at a rapid rate of knots. I mean, the platform’s actually 12 years old. We’ve done a major redesign over the last couple of years and actually we did some kind of counting before we came into this session. In the last 12 months, we’ve made 1,000 changes to the platform and added 250 new features, and most of them are in the AI space yet.
Patrick Moorhead: I’m glad the conversation has also moved from the core switch to the edge and campus, where there’s going to be a tremendous amount of action going on, particularly because this is where a lot of the data is being created. If you even follow history, history says ultimately where the data is created, the most optimal place to do the computing is on the edge as well. And you know, we talked to the sister division, the compute division, about this before. But listen, I know you love all of your children equally at HPE Aruba, but can you talk to me about what is the biggest news that you brought out? I mean, you got the first billing, right?
Phil Mottram: Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Tony came out and he said, here are our priorities and number one is networking.
Phil Mottram: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: What did you announce here?
Phil Mottram: Yeah, so, so what we talked about, we have a range of different products. So, you know, Wi Fi, campus switching, SD WAN data center products, private 5G, but they’re all Kind of linked under the Aruba Central platform. And what we were speaking about in terms of our announcements was the addition of some agentic AI capabilities into Aruba Central. So we’ve kind of announced something called the AI Mesh, where we’re kind of bringing together all of these agentic AI sub agents and making it easier for customers to kind of break into that and use that technology and maybe just to try and bring that to life a little bit more about what the platform’s actually doing for customers. We’ve pre configured some features that we think would be useful to any customer. Right. And one example is something called the automated power savings feature. So what the platform will do is if you’ve got an office building, let’s say you’ve got 200 access points in the office building and it senses that, I don’t know, 3 o’ clock on a Friday, only 10 are being used through till 9 o’ clock on Monday morning. Well, the platform will come back and make a recommendation and say, actually you know what, these other 190 access points, why don’t you put them into a deep sleep mode to save yourself kind of time, money, energy consumption, consumption, et cetera.
So there’s kind of like prepackaged type features and then kind of what we’ve morphed into now is more agentic AI where what the network, well, what the platform’s doing is it’s trying to spot problems on the network, understand what the problem relates to and make a fix. And that really helps network customers and network technicians because it’s kind of bringing almost an extra team into managing the network. Right. And I think that’s where the future of this lies and I think that’s going to be a bit of a journey. Right. So the way that we’ve kind of designed it within the platform is the platform will make a recommendation to the customer and say, hey, you know, we think you should make this change to the network. Do you want to do it? And the customers, most customers in the early phases want to say, well, I want to push a button to authorize that.
Patrick Moorhead: Kind of a human in the loop.
Phil Mottram: Correct. But over time, you know, customers will say, you know what, I trust the platform, so actually don’t ask me, just make the change. So that’s where this is all heading.
Patrick Moorhead: And one of the bigger discussions about automation like this with AI has, has been around skills. Right. On one hand you have very capable and competent networking people who’ve been doing this for some, have been doing this for 20 years. They’re flipping buttons up and out. What does it mean in terms of skill sets or what does this, does it give superpowers to the network admins?
Phil Mottram: Yeah. So again, within the Aruba central platform, what we built is some natural language capabilities. So kind of what we find is network technicians are in pretty high demand and when organizations lose them because they move to a competitor or they retire, you know, there’s a bit of a panic really in terms of who’s going to backfill. Quite often they’ll go to kind of earlier career hires and try to pull them into the network team. And if you’ve got this kind of natural language search capabilities in the platform, it makes it way easier for them to kind of get up to speed with what’s going on the network and help fix it. So yeah, I think AI is really going to help, kind of freeing up time for network admins, but also making it easier for kind of earlier career network admins to go in and manage networks for customers.
Daniel Newman: It’s kind of interesting though because it almost feels like these two things are sort of forces that are a bit opposed. Part of me, when I listen to the story about agentic and you talk about these network engineers never sleep, they don’t need to eat, they will just manage networks all night and day long. You’re going, huh, that seems like that particular technology is going to do a lot of what entry levels do. On the other hand, in some ways, Phil, this kind of promise of autonomous or autonomy or you know, is RPA. There’s been ipa, there’s been AI, there’s been machine learning, there’s been, it’s like trend, trend, trend. What’s different in your mind about this sort of era of agentic and what you’re seeing in terms of its capabilities? Have we really reached that inflection? The intelligence is there and we’re going to get what I think has been kind of promised for a while.
Phil Mottram: Yeah, I think that’s right. Look, I think there’s a couple of points I would make. One is it is very real, it’s here and now and customers are using it. Right. So it’s no longer a kind of an idea on a whiteboard. Right? It’s there and it’s being used. And then to your earlier point about these kinds of opposing forces, if you go and speak to most network engineers, the level of security threats that they’re facing is increasing exponentially and actually they just can’t cope with that. So anything you can do to free up time over here to help Them protect against the security threats. That’s a huge win for organizations.
Patrick Moorhead: What I’ve heard on the compute side, networking side, data side is something that I can get around. I mean I run a small company, a few of them, but to be able to put people on revenue generating projects, right. Typically when you go to it, you have this great idea like, hey, 90% of my time I’m spending keeping the lights on, what if that could go to 50%. The other 40% could be used to actually work on maybe building new branches, having some amazing new retail experiences out there, or a fan experience if you’re in some sort of a stadium. And I don’t know if this is just wishful thinking or something like that, but it seems to be one of those possibilities that this technology can bring.
Phil Mottram: You’re 100% right. And actually one of the use cases we talked to some customers about yesterday was we said, let’s say you have a meeting room, right? And there’s all sorts of different kinds of protocols kind of whizzing around networks, right? One of the protocols is a roaming protocol called 802.11r. Right.
Patrick Moorhead: I pretend like I know what that is.
Phil Mottram: Yeah. And I was saying, by the way, but the net of it is right? Apple does a great job in terms of supporting that protocol. Some of the other handset manufacturers don’t, right? So let’s say in the morning in a particular conference room you had a lot of Apple phone users, they’d be sitting there thinking, wow, WI fi is great. In the afternoon, if you had a very low percentage of Apple users, but people were using other brands, they’d be sitting there thinking there’s something wrong with the WI fi, right? It’s actually not the WI fi, it’s the fact that their handset doesn’t do a great job of supporting this protocol. Now the platform can work that out and say, actually you know what, I’ve kind of worked this, I’ve seen this problem before and what I need to do is if I just switch that routing protocol off for the afternoon, the experience for all of those non Apple handset users immediately will be fine. And then when they all leave, you can just go back to the normal way of operation, right? So just, you know, this ability to be able to see what’s going on in the network, identify the problem, put in the fix and then potentially reverse back the fix. You know, that’s where this is all going.
Daniel Newman: If you really look at how it all evolves as we’ve seen with each of the industrial revolutions, the productivity volume is substantially larger. So, you know, we’ve heard something like 20 trillion plus added to the global economy.
Phil Mottram: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: So those people that were doing the more mundane roles will move up and then what’s now considered a more sophisticated role becomes those mundane roles. And that’s kind of been how we’ve leveled over time. It’s just not obvious. Like, you know, I’m somewhere in between the doomsayer guy that’s like, there’s no job for any of us. Analysts are going away tomorrow. And then the other side of me is looking at we’re gonna see so much productivity gain. But it just happened so fast. Like in the past, we’ve had a little bit more time with these transformations. We start to see what’s gonna come during the mobile era or the Internet era. And by the way, those felt fast.
Phil Mottram: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel Newman: But we just, we’ve been through it, but, but this is way quicker. Now, you alluded to something about security. Yeah, you’ve mentioned it a few times. It’s such a big piece of the story. It’s secular. As the AI boom goes, I think security goes with it. And over time, a lot of companies have sort of looked at security like insurance, like, what’s the least we can invest to stay secure in the AI era, I think it’s gloves are off. Like, companies have to get in front of this. They have to go bigger. In your mind, the security first approach, how big of an opportunity is it and talk a little bit about how HP is thinking about it.
Phil Mottram: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, one of our kinds of phrases is security first AI powered networking. So that’s what we’re all about. And there’s been a big change in the way organizations have gone about security. So historically you would kind of build a moat and try and keep everyone out. Right. And now what you’re seeing is this move towards zero trust security solutions. Right. And this links to a convergence of security and networking coming together. Right. So they’re almost kind of becoming the same product. And the way I think about it is, you know, HPE’s got 57,000 people working here and where it’s part of our core business, the HPE employees. But we have lots of partners involved in what we do, and those partners need access to our systems in order to collaborate effectively with hpe. And I think lots of companies are like that as well, by the way, aren’t they? So the great thing about zero trust networking is you’re able to allocate specific permissions to individual users or devices based on where you want them to go across your network. So, you know, what we’re doing is we’re building more and more security as part of the network. And that basically adds extra protection, but also gives you permission to be able to kind of give some partners access to systems, employees to different systems, whatever it might be. It gives you a more comprehensive security approach.
Patrick Moorhead: Makes sense.
Daniel Newman: Well, Phil, I want to thank you so much for spending a little time with us. It’s been great to see your portfolio get so much attention here. I know like I said in the beginning, you and I have been big fans of this network wave. And while GPUs may be the story of last year’s LLMs, the future is going to be how we move the data and how we power all these data centers. So you’ve got a big job in front of you. Let’s keep in touch. I look forward to chatting again next year at HP Discover or sometime in between.
Phil Mottram: Yeah, that’s great. Thanks very much. Thank you. Great to see you. You both.
Patrick Moorhead: Thanks.
Daniel Newman: And thank you so much for being part of this Six Five On the Road live at HPE Discover 2025. Subscribe Be part of the Six Five community. Check out all of the coverage that we did here at this event. More is coming soon. Stick with us.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
