 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE coverage of HPE Discover 2017. That's Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with my co-host for the next three days, Dave Vellante, Chief Analyst at Wikibon and co-founder with me of theCUBE. Our next guest is Partha Narasimhan, who's the CTO of Aruba, now part of HPE for multiple years, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, thanks for having me here. Chief Technology Officer of Aruba, we get to go into the hood a little bit, but it's really important that we kind of have that context because the wireless is beyond just Wi-Fi. I mean, Wi-Fi is joked on the internet as the lower level of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs means the biggest complaint people have. Where's the Wi-Fi? Is it secure? So, Wi-Fi obviously in wireless. Certainly brings that digital life. Now you take wireless in an enterprise environment, unlimited possibilities with internet of things, campus, intelligent edges, the key part of this theme. Welcome to theCUBE and thanks for joining us. Thank you. So your thoughts on the intelligent edge, what is Aruba's real innovation happening now? Where's the fruit coming off the trees beyond just the access to wireless, which we all know is like freedom? Right, and so if you think of it, people tend to think of wireless as just, okay, getting rid of the cables. Right, yes, it does that, but it does a lot more than getting rid of the cables. And if you think about what it allows you to do, wireless enables mobility, right? So as people walk around and stay connected to all the things that they need connectivity to, we allow that to happen. But wireless enabling mobility also means that we have now the ability to observe things in the physical world that people reside in, right? The kinds of things that they interact with, whether it's in the workplace as part of their work or whether it's as a customer when you enter a retail store or when you enter a stadium or a venue for an event. How do we now gather our understanding of context from purely from a digital domain? Combine that with what we are learning about context, the other side of context from the physical domain, blend that together, one to either create new experiences for end users or to enhance existing ones that they're already used to. How can they make it work better, right? And we have these use cases in many ways. It's a true enabling technology and these new scenarios are net new. So I want to get into the use case but I first want to get the hard news out of the way. You guys have some announcements here at HP Discover that are notable. One is an extension to the core switches, 8400 line, real focus on the intelligent edge and the other one is really comprehensive asset tracking. Assets could be anything, could be people, could be the machines, devices and whatnot. This really kind of highlights the things that are possible. Obviously asset tracking is instrumentation, it's also big data, it's internet of things. Talk about this intelligent edge, talk about the switches and the asset tracking. What is the notable things about those two announcements? Let's start with the 8400, right? It's a big core and aggressive aggregation switch. We don't have many of those built over the years in the industry, right? There's been very small number of instances of switches like this built in here but the big difference with the 8400 is it's actually the first one that was completely built in an era where that is defined increasingly by mobility and IoT, right? Think of mobility. With mobility, topology is never a constant, right? I can never assume that the network topology is set and it never changes or changes can be controlled in some perspective. So if you start with a given that topology is not a constant, how do we now create a switch that enables network administrators to deploy networks without having to worry about old methods of configuring and monitoring the switches, right? So this was built ground up with the notion that it has to support today's use cases, right? Not overlay today's use cases onto a switch that I might have built 20 years ago, correct, right? So programmability was important, modularity was important. It is built on a basic premise that the entire state of the network, the switch is stored in a database that is accessible through modern interfaces, right? It allows you to take that switch, plug it into existing workflows that are more modern than to try and force fit these modern workflows be constrained by technologies that were invented like 15, 20 years ago. So that is the one that's important, right? In addition to all of the connectivity options, the speeds and feeds that we have to go build, it's extremely interesting and there are advances in innovation on that side. The one that excites me the most is the software layer in the switch, right? That allows for the programmability. It allows for visibility, right? I'm able to get access to all of the state of the switch and any trouble problems that I see, I can quickly get to the bottom off and go back and fix it. But more importantly, the biggest innovation that I think we have is this thing that we call the network analytics engine, right? This is what gives you the extensibility property for the switch where your ability to go extend the capabilities of the switch in the field, right? Not have to wait for our engineers to deliver features, but people in the field, either customers or our own field engineers can extend the capabilities of the switch to go do things that we didn't think of but exist in the field. So before we get to asset tracking, I love the way this press release was worded and you kind of hit on it, John. Setting it apart from other core aggregation switches in the market, the 8400's most unique innovation is the Aruba OS CX, a modern software foundation that is a departure from today's static inflexible operating systems design. I'm not sure exactly who you're talking about there, but nonetheless, so when you talk about this network analytics engine, are you suggesting that makers of static inflexible operating system designs would have to bolt something like that on and it would just not be as effective or would it not be possible? Well, you have to go deeper into the operating system and do major surgery for that to happen, right? And that is very hard to do. So if you've already built it for a certain static use case and you're trying to now introduce a bolt on certain things in there, you will always be limited by what lies underneath, right? Compared to, if you look at the operating system, Aruba OS CX, it was built from the ground up with the modularity and extensibility in mind, including the programmability for configuring the switches. This is not something that you can bolt on later and go fix it because you have to go very deep into the operating system and there's a lot of major surgery work that is for a switch of this magnitude and size, the effort is as good as starting from scratch, throwing everything away and starting from scratch and building it new. That is very hard to do. It tells us about the asset tracking. Let's not, I didn't want to lose that. That's big enough. Well, the asset tracking, I want to get before we get that point. Okay, go. Operating systems are generally about connecting things, subsystems. You mentioned the wireless is unpredictable, which is true, I agree that. Now internet of things is even more unpredictable and the rate of devices connecting a watch on someone's wrist, a wearable, a phone. So the new Apple announcements yesterday, we covered that on SiliconANGLE.com. Again, more and more consumer devices and yet industrial equipment. This is important from, I mean, it's not just machinery. It's like, it could be the air conditioning. It could be anything. Thoughts on this asset tracking concept? I'll start with the IoT side and how it applies to the network and get to the asset tracking, right? Let me start with an example. One of our university customers narrated the story, right? They said one day the facilities people called and said, hey, we just went out and swapped out about 400 door locks in a residence hall with Wi-Fi enabled door locks and then they turn on the 400 of them and they don't work. And the network people are saying, sure, it doesn't work. We're not surprised because the network's not built to have arbitrary things come in and start working. But if you look at it from the people that are deploying this equipment, they just think, hey, it's Wi-Fi. It should just connect and work, right? Versus people running the network have certain ways in which they have configured the network for either quality of service or for security that you have to understand. But the network admins are also in a state where they just say that battle is probably lost, right? People are going to add things to my environment and my job is to go make sure that I gracefully accept them in and fit them into a profile in the security profile that I already have. So this is where the programmability is key, right? As door locks come in, chances are those door locks don't need to communicate with everything on the network, maybe only to a very specific server that pushes policy on which keys should open a particular door and which one shouldn't. But if you look at networks that are typically designed with a certain notion of trust, saying, okay, I have a security parameter, whether it's a physical parameter that allows me entry into the building or a digital parameter that, you know, I have a DMZ and a firewall, but once you're on the inside, you're in a safe zone. That safe zone is being challenged by IoT, right? Because these devices are not capable to begin with, right? Think of an electronic door lock and compare it with many of the servers and the compute capabilities and the servers on the show floor versus what is available in the door lock. By itself, it's starting out with a very huge disadvantage on that front, but more importantly, the compute capabilities of a door lock are frozen in time and they tend to stay on the door for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years versus the compute capabilities that are available to an attacker keep space with technology. So over time, the ability for the door lock to protect itself diminishes, right? And this is not just through door locks, it's through any of these IoT type of things that are getting added to the system. So our goal is as we gracefully accept them and get them connected to the network and provide the network guys with the tools to kind of segment them into appropriate boundaries. We also have a need to go monitor their activity all the time because they become juicy targets for hackers to get into and from there propagate out to the rest of the network. So how do we know they're not getting attacked, their vulnerability is not getting exploited? And the only way to do this is to continuously monitor them but more importantly to use a machine learning approach, a behavioral approach rather than a signature based detection, right? So if I baseline behaviors of a certain IoT device whether it's a door lock or a security camera or any number of those and whenever I see deviations from that baseline behavior I want to alert somebody because while it is an anomaly not all anomalies are malicious but it could be potentially and you need somebody to look at it, right? So how do we quickly detect that? Okay, there's a deviation and is it malicious and how do we react to it and how do we shut it down? Now talk about the asset tracking now, you know, because that's relevant to this show. What's the status, the news, what's the notable thing about the Aruba asset tracking? So the asset tracking is interesting on two counts. One is, you know, when you want to track an asset you need to attach a tag to it, right? That kind of puts out some notion of identity that I can attach to that asset but there's also the infrastructure side of it, right? You need an infrastructure that picks up on these signals and can locate the asset and can figure out where all it's been and who's kind of used it and how it's getting used. So while we look at asset tags as one improvement the infrastructure is also another improvement, right? Aruba, we started down the Bluetooth Low Energy as one of the elements for our location-based services strategy, right? Look at Meridian was, that Meridian team is a center of gravity for all location-based services. We started out with Beacons and using the Beacons as an indication of location and then providing contextual information and semantic information about that location. But over time we've also recognized that in addition to Beacons we've integrated Bluetooth into our access points. So any wireless LAN infrastructure that's based off of the Aruba solution that is getting deployed today is already ready for one half of the asset tracking solution. So the other half is the tags that we're introducing that can be attached to high-value assets and then together these two combine with a backend solution that not only provides you with where the assets are and where they've been but also uses APIs to integrate with other asset tracking larger solutions that you might have. So you're feeding data into a bigger picture on the edge. Absolutely. All right, so let's talk about the fun stuff now. So we're getting under the hood there, getting a little technical, which is great. There's some real sexy deployments out there that you guys have been involved in. One is we've talked about folks watching theCUBE know. Levi's Stadium in San Francisco for the San Francisco 49ers is highly instrumented. Venue Next is the provider, that great service provider. You guys are the provider there. But it's interesting, there's other use cases. So talk about a little bit about how the use cases are driving the value and how people who are discovering these new value creation opportunities. How do they get there and give us some examples? So Levi's Stadium, okay, we tend to talk about it a lot but it also is because we learned a lot of things as part of being, you know, we were fortunate to be part of that exercise and we learned a lot of things. So one key learning was the people that built the stadium were very clear from the beginning. Their competition was not another sporting venue, right? It's not the Oakland Raiders fans that they wanted to attract over into the stadium. They were very clear their competition was a TV in your living room, right? How do I convince a fan to not watch the game on the TV in their living room but instead to come into the stadium and watch it, right? And so they said, here's a list of experiences that I want to create for the fan that you can only have in the stadium and that are compelling enough to get a fan into the stadium to watch the game. So once you define those, then it becomes a lot easier, right? The rest of it underlying here is all technology and we know how to piece it together. So this was one of the first instances where we saw, you know, the whole experience, the whole thing, the whole infrastructure build out being driven top down, right? You define your experiences and then you work your way down on what kind of pieces of technology we need to go in there. Otherwise the networking industry was largely driven by, hey, here's the connectivity infrastructure and we'll, you know, figure out what hooks are available and then we'll figure out what you can do with it. You can strain naturally with that. Correct, but if you start from the top, lots of things become easier, right? The, you know, what we need can be customized to go address the specific problems that we want to go in there. And this is not something new. As you look at, you know, yes, it was true for the stadium but the retail stores have a similar problem, right? How do I convince a user to not buy, you know, a particular item online and instead come into the store to do it? And Apple's done a pretty good job with it, right? Their whole store is not a place where you go pick items off of the shelf, put it in your cart and check it out. It is a place where you go and interact with the item. Experience. Experience, again. Right as- One of the verticals are hot right now, so retail makes sense, sports makes sense. What are the verticals? Hospitality is another one where you want to create an experience that customers associate with that brand, right? If I can somehow make the whole process of you checking into a hotel room and being in the hotel room and then checking out if that whole experience can be made significantly better, then I'm going to associate it with that brand and the next time I'm in, you know, looking for a hotel- So this opportunity for brands to extend their brand value digitally. Correct. It is by creating a better experience in the physical world, you tie it to your brand and customers associate it with it, right? Awesome. And then you go into the workplace. Again, employees. And how do I help improve their productivity with what kind of experiences? More and more workplaces are shifting to more open environments, all wireless workplace, because, you know, even if I had wires, there's nothing that I can plug into. I have three devices with me in my bag, right? Nothing with an ethernet port in there. And we recently moved into a new facility in Santa Clara in January of this year. And the one thing you'll notice is that there are no wires running to where people sit. And so when you go into an all-wireless workplace, when you convince users that it's viable, right? And the way to convince users it's viable is that the network is always there when they need it, when they need to do something on it, right? But the facilities people are also excited by that possibility, because it gives them a lot of flexibility in how they want to reconfigure space. It's the future of work and the future of play kind of converging with analog and digital kind of coming together. Correct. With experiences at the center. And wireless is the fabric for it all. Correct. And wireless is what enables mobility, but more importantly, location is the other fabric that connects the two worlds, right? If I can sense location on the digital side, location is an attribute of the physical world. And that's what bridges the two together. Context, interest, location, these are all new variables, a whole new way of doing things. In fact, the modern mobility we suggest, still can't even keep on in the cube is, this is going to be the future of work, future of play all around modern mobility. Correct. Arthur, thanks so much for sharing your insights. The CTO here of Aruba Wireless doing some amazing things, enabling new possibilities here in the new simplified. Sounds complex to me, but it sounds like you're simplifying it. That's the new messaging from HB. Thanks for sharing your insights. Of course, we're bringing that modern data to you here on the cube here, live in Las Vegas, our exclusive coverage for three days. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more after this short break.