How is next-generation connectivity setting the foundation for the future of AI and edge computing?
At #HPEDiscover Las Vegas 2025, join David Nicholson, Keith Townsend, and Moor Insights & Strategy‘s VP & Principal Analyst Will Townsend, for a conversation straight from the HPE Discover 2025 keynote. The discussion delves into the transformative role of next-generation connectivity in HPE’s strategy for AI and edge computing.
Key takeaways include:
🔹Evolving Networking Narratives: A deep dive into how HPE has articulated its networking vision, featuring advancements like the CX 10K switches with doubled scale and performance, and the deeper integration between Aruba Networking and OpsRamp, signaling a shift towards distributed scale and pervasive AI-readiness.
🔹Enhanced Observability as a Core Tenet: An exploration of the heightened focus on observability, particularly through the seamless integration with OpsRamp, revealing its foundational importance within HPE’s strategic networking framework.
🔹Zero Trust Evolution & New Policy Capabilities: Insights into the ongoing evolution of Zero Trust security and HPE Aruba’s latest policy capabilities, reflecting their critical significance in modern security frameworks across complex environments.
🔹Enabling New Edge & AI Experiences: How next-generation networking directly enables novel experiences as workloads transition to the edge and applications become increasingly intelligent, underscoring the network’s indispensable role in supporting these critical advancements.
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Transcript:
David Nicholson: Welcome to Six Five On The Road live here at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025. I’m Dave Nicholson and I am joined by the Townsends, Will and Keith. How are you gentlemen doing?
Will Townsend: I’m doing great, Dave, thanks for having me.
David Nicholson: Well, talk to us about the keynote. Yeah, networking was a big theme. What was different this year from previous years? Give us your assessment of what we heard this morning.
Will Townsend: Shocking. Agentic, right? So one of the big announcements was Aruba and its agentic AI mesh. Over 15 agents that are going to do a number of different things to facilitate root cause, troubleshoot, diagnose issues and ultimately remediate them all with automation. Really big. I do like the emphasis that HPE is playing on the importance of networking. Often that gets lost in the compute and in the storage piece. But at the end of the day, if you can’t move that data around, you can’t train it, you can’t inference off it.
David Nicholson: Right. Often ignored networking. Keith, what are you thinking?
Keith Townsend: So I think he gave a lot of love to networking in general. I was actually surprised. I don’t think I remember a HPE discovered in recent memory that wasn’t keynoted, kind of by Aruba giving the vision for networking and it getting elevated to the CEO level, to Antonio’s level. But observability was another big point. And I think outside of storage, I haven’t heard HPE talk about observability at all.
Will Townsend: No, Keith, it’s a good point. The company hasn’t focused on it traditionally, although it did acquire opsramp and it’s been quickly integrating opsramp into the entire tech stack and that includes networking as well. I’m quite impressed with opsramp. I’ve spent time with the team recently. Gratuitous plug. I did a webinar with the team a few months ago. I also wrote something on the Moor Insights and Strategy website. But at a very high level, observability is very important, providing visibility into the estate of devices that are on a network. Not only Aruba, but also multi vendor as well. And the real advantage in doing that is twofold in my opinion. One, it provides a higher level of network assurance so that you can make networks more resilient, you can understand faults, find gaps of visibility and that sort of thing. It also improves security posture as well because again, it identifies those weaker areas of the network. And I really like what the company is doing with that opsramp integration.
David Nicholson: You talk about security, zero trust is something we talk about from a security perspective, first, I would like to coin a phrase between the three of us, can we agree “that secret agentic” would be cool?
Will Townsend: That would be really cool.
David Nicholson: Okay, secret agentic.
Will Townsend: Secret almost secret agent agentic.
David Nicholson: Exactly.
Keith Townsend: That’s dead level. That’s dead level.
David Nicholson: So on the subject of secret agentic, but zero trust with HPE Aruba, what does that look like?
Will Townsend: Well, I mean, it’s nothing new for the Aruba team. I mean, they’ve been focused on least privilege access for many, many years. This dates back to its AIOps. They launched something called the Edge services platform. I actually wrote a paper about that many years ago. But what I like to tell people is the fact that fabrics are becoming sexy again, to quote Justin Timberlake. And what a fabric is. It’s taking networking, it’s integrating security into it. And when you do that inherently it is more secure by nature when that is done. And then from my perspective also, cybersecurity is a layered approach. You’re going to have endpoint security, you’re going to have security within the infrastructure stack. SASE is basically SD WAN with additional security controls. So at the end of the day, long way to answer your question, Dave, but it’s nothing that’s new to Aruba. But what I really like is the focus, especially with what we heard today about Greenlake Intelligence and what the company is doing to sort of drive that cloud natively through the entire stack.
David Nicholson: So wait, what’s the term for that again? You said least what?
Will Townsend: Least privileged access.
David Nicholson: Least privileged access. It sounds like no soup for you.
Will Townsend: You can interpret it that way.
David Nicholson: That’s what I hear.
Keith Townsend: So following on, kind of pulling on that thread we heard in the analyst session the other day and from the stage yesterday, Antonio talked about kind of the future of security and networking. Where are you seeing those worlds come together this week? From the keynote?
Will Townsend: Well, I mean, it’s that conversion story that I was just talking about, the fabrics. Right. And so you’re continuing to see that convergence. And I think the other thing that’s happening as well, at least from a security perspective within organizations, is the need to consolidate. Tool sprawl is out of control. You know, the stats are alarming. You know, an average mid market site’s company is managing 40 to 50 point solutions. From a security standpoint, if you’re a larger multinational footprint, it can be in the hundreds. And so there’s all this discussion around platformization that really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? But it’s the whole notion of consolidating tool sets, again, integrating that into the network fabric. One of the things that I don’t believe HPE gets credit for is that they were actually the first to launch a smart switch with the CX10000. That was in 2022. You’ve seen competitors launch similar products. What a smart switch is is basically it takes DPU functionality. In the case of HPE, it’s AMD pin Sando. And when you do that, it allows you to embed security services like firewalls. And that’s something that Antonio did talk about earlier this week. There’s almost a, you know, know, an opportunity to eliminate the traditional firewall because now you can embed virtual firewalls into switches and into network fabrics as well. So. Yeah.
Keith Townsend: You actually just led into, I think my next question, which is how is this all enabling the intelligent, what we called, you know, just a couple of years ago, the intelligent edge applications are getting smarter. That intelligence is being pushed out to the edge. How is networking enabling that?
Will Townsend: Well, again, to support these AI workloads, you need very predictable performance. You can’t have spikes, you can’t have outages, because that totally wrecks like an agentic AI workflow. As an example, with generative AI, that is manageable, but in an agentic world, it’s not manageable. So, number one, that’s important. And I think the other thing that you’re beginning to see with switches and even with access points, the compute infrastructure is coming to these edge devices. So Snapdragon, Qualcomm Snapdragon, they’re doing XPUs in very, very small ASIC packages. And so that allows you to do things like inferencing on an access point. Now, we’re not seeing that yet, but that’s going to be coming, by my prediction, very, very soon. And so that’s what’s making networking intelligent, is you’re putting compute within the network infrastructure layer to unlock new use cases like I just described.
David Nicholson: Yeah, a lot was said about networking and it makes perfect sense. And I know we sometimes think of networking as the unsung hero. Yeah, obviously data is at the center. Of all of this. And if you can’t network this data together and access this data knowledge,
Will Townsend: It doesn’t work.
David Nicholson: You dead in the water. I want to go back to the top of the keynote. Okay, One word. Ambition.
Will Townsend: Right.
David Nicholson: So sometimes these things can be dismissed as marketing propaganda, nonsense. I really took that to heart because I have a lot of folks, folks that Keith and I talk to on a daily basis who are asking, where do I start? Where do I start with AI? How do I, how do I make money? How do I save money with AI? And the funny thing is you can say it has to start with ambition. Ambition equaling, I would argue, what are you trying to solve for? What’s the opportunity you’re trying to pursue? We’ve all heard global systems integrators say that they are different because they don’t talk about tools.
Will Townsend: They talk about outcomes.
David Nicholson: Exactly, exactly. So I really thought that the whole idea of things starting with ambition was clever and that’s a really good place to start from. But overall, what kind of grade would you give the extravaganza in the sphere?
Will Townsend: I got to tell you, this is the second year, so I was here last year and HPE was the first company to do a keynote in the sphere. So they’ve had a year to hone it, refine it. I was blown away. I just came out of a Q and A with Antonio and he was talking about how a lot of that imagery that we saw today was AI generated and the fidelity on that was incredible. The waterfall at the very, very beginning was unbelievable. But I love the fact, Dave, that you brought up ambition and it was almost the way that Antonio dropped the mic when he exited the stage. And for me the most impactful story and use case was St. Jude’s Hospital and how they’re leaning into HPE compute, HPE networking, HPE storage to save children from cancer. So for me that was the mic drop moment.
David Nicholson: Yeah, amazing. What do you think overall? Were you the subject of ambition or just overall the messaging you’re seeing?
Keith Townsend: So overall I think HPE has solidified its messaging really around observability management, this multi vendor, because they didn’t just talk about it in networking, they talked about it in compute, managing other compute orchestrating clouds. They’re really trying to be this centralized point to come to for your hybrid infrastructure. So whether you’re, you know, you have 15 year old Gen 8 servers or if you have the latest Gen 12 servers along with the latest Aruba networking ops ramp and this Greenlake intelligence platform is the platform to come manage you at. And I agree with you, they’re taking a lot of the key, a lot of this is core Aruba technology.
Will Townsend: It is, yeah.
David Nicholson: Well Will, if you had to leave someone with one takeaway, what’s the TLDR on what IT leaders should think from a networking perspective that’s coming out of this?
Will Townsend: Don’t assume that your plumbing is going to be adequate to support your needs in the immediate future. I mean, generative AI has been transformative with co pilots and that sort of thing. Agentic is really going to unlock the promise of automation at scale. You’re going to need smart, intelligent, very fat pipes to do that. And so as IT decision makers are budgeting for that compute infrastructure, make sure that you also budget commensurately for that networking infrastructure.
David Nicholson: Yeah, it makes sense. Well, I think it’s fair to say that networking has always been cool, at least according to us. We’re not cool, but we’ve always thought it was cool. But networking got a little attention that it absolutely deserved in the keynote today. And HPE is all over it. Six Five On the Road live here at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025. I’m Dave Nicholson for Keith Townsend and Will Townsend. Stay tuned for more.
Author Information
David Nicholson is Chief Research Officer at The Futurum Group, a host and contributor for Six Five Media, and an Instructor and Success Coach at Wharton’s CTO and Digital Transformation academies, out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business’s Arresty Institute for Executive Education.
David interprets the world of Information Technology from the perspective of a Chief Technology Officer mindset, answering the question, “How is the latest technology best leveraged in service of an organization’s mission?” This is the subject of much of his advisory work with clients, as well as his academic focus.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, David held technical leadership positions at EMC, Oracle, and Dell. He is also the founder of DNA Consulting, providing actionable insights to a wide variety of clients seeking to better understand the intersection of technology and business.
Keith Townsend is a technology management consultant with more than 20 years of related experience in designing, implementing, and managing data center technologies. His areas of expertise include virtualization, networking, and storage solutions for Fortune 500 organizations. He holds a BA in computing and an MS in information technology from DePaul University.
