HPE Completes Acquisition of Silver Peak

S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• The acquisition of Silver Peak by HPE is complete and will be beneficial overall, creating a complete offering with SD-Branch

• The SD-WAN market is still hot and a new wave of consolidation is on the horizon.

In July 2020, HPE announced its intent to acquire one of the leading SD-WAN vendors, Silver Peak. Silver Peak has been fighting it out with big competitors and doing very well for itself. Along with Versa, Cisco, and VMware, Silver Peak are considered to be among the top contenders in the marketplace today. HPE and its Aruba networking division have generally been considered the number two competitor in the campus and branch networking markets, but the Aruba proposition has not been able to get recognition or traction in the SD-WAN market. HPE was a very early adopter of the SD-Branch concept, but unfortunately was too early for a market starry-eyed with SD-WAN enthusiasm.

The acquisition of Silver Peak solves HPE’s SD-WAN problem and does it decisively. It puts HPE firmly on the map for SD-WAN and gives it a strong product to pair with its Aruba networking lines. It also strengthens the SD-Branch message considerably. HPE has been moving boldly in 2020, both with its Greenlake subscription program for infrastructure, as well as with its ESP platform in the Aruba division and now with its completed acquisition of Silver Peak. Clearly, HPE has embraced change and is acting on it. With the exception of Greenlake, which is still a question mark around customer acceptance, these moves will leave HPE stronger in the long run.

From the perspective of Silver Peak, the acquisition was not only a slam-dunk validation of its SD-WAN product, but a way to become part of the larger movement towards the secure SD-Branch environment. As a stand-alone SD-WAN vendor, Silver Peak did not have the switching, security, or Wi-Fi products necessary to compete as SD-WAN becomes more of a feature of an overall solution as time goes on. The Silver Peak SD-WAN solution will work well with HPE’s SD-Branch play and integrate with Aruba Central over time.

The SD-WAN market continues to grow and evolve. Consolidation is occurring again, first with Palo Alto’s acquisition of CloudGenix, and now with HPE’s completion of the Silver Peak acquisition. We expect that there will be more consolidation in the SD-WAN space, with companies like Versa high on the list of possible acquisition targets. There are still too many SD-WAN vendors and it is clear that integration with not just security but with switching and Wi-Fi are going to be key competitive factors.