 Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We're back in Madrid, Spain, everybody. This is theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Kirti Melkote is here, he's a co-founder and CTO of Aruba. Kirti, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Absolutely, my pleasure to be here again. So I want to go back to when you co-founded Aruba. What was your vision? What was the outcome that you were perceiving for your customers and how has that journey manifested itself to where you are today? Wow, it goes back a long time, Dave. How does it say? 15 years ago. And do it in 15 minute increments. Right, so I spent my early days of my career at Cisco, in fact, building land switches. And the big rage then was to plug into the network, into the internet. And we sold a boatload of these catalyst boxes to all sorts of enterprise customers throughout the world. And around 2002, when I started Aruba, I spoke to a few customers about what's next for them around the horizon. It was very clear that it was not the next Ethernet standard. It was not about going from 100 megabits to 1,000 megabits. Like, they have a lot of bandwidth going to everybody's desks. What they wanted to talk about was, how can I connect my people when they're away from their desks? And that naturally led to more of a wireless solution. And Wi-Fi, which was still very early back in 2002, was the answer, but when I asked them, why are they not adopting Wi-Fi? And they said, hey, it's not secure. It doesn't have the performance I need. It's not manageable. In other words, it's simply not ready for enterprise. Could be a good for the home, in the consumer world, but not for the enterprise. I took that as a challenge and said, hey, looks like a business opportunity. Let's see if I can convince someone to pay me, or at least fund my idea, and to solve those problems. And when you go with the business plan to venture capitalists, they ask for two things. They say, hey, what's your technology differentiation? Which are all the things I talked about. We solve the security problem, the manageability problem, the deployment problem, and the like. But they also ask you, why can't Cisco do this and kill you guys? And what gives you the right to exist? And the thing that I learned about business is if you're disruptive, it's a good thing, especially to the incumbent. And wireless was fundamentally disruptive to Cisco, because we were basically, our value prop was, you don't need all these wires. And if you built a business on connecting people on wires, my business was about unplugging and still staying connected. So it was naturally disruptive and it led to, we didn't foresee the boom in mobility that we had seen. At that time, we didn't even have an iPhone or an iPad. It was about laptops. So we had a fun time connecting the laptop carrying workforce in university campuses, in enterprises, and the like. But our business changed dramatically in two ways. One was when the iPad was introduced, our customer said, here's a personal device and the idea of bring your own device became popular with the iPad, where employees bring their own devices and there's no security model to connect them into the enterprise. So we allowed them to connect over wireless and there's no ethernet on an iPad. You can't plug it in even if you want to. So that made Wi-Fi more of a pervasive technology. And at the same time, we were coming out of the 2008 economic recession. So there was a lot of, I would say, demand for new ways to accomplish more of the same with reduced budgets. And so we said, with wireless, you can really cut out the wires and lower your cost and yet keep people connected. And so that sort of gave us the boom. So it started as a technical challenge. And one that you just said, okay, I'm going to just dive in and we'll see what, I remember Bob Metcalfe, Peter at one point was asked the question. We used to work with him at IDG. Wireless or wired, that was business back in the late 90s, right? And he said, well, ethernet guy, so he even hinted it. So he said, well, wireless is always going to be better. He said, but I can't predict what's going to happen in the future. It's hard to believe that wireless isn't just going to explode at some point. I don't know why. And then this was, of course, before the iPad, before the smartphones, you as well, when you started the company. And then, and I would imagine the VCs were asking about the market potential. And now you fast forward to the days when HPE saw the opportunity. I mean, it's just seemed so blatantly obvious now with the intelligent edge. So take us forward to where we are today. What's that? Obviously the TAM has changed completely. And the wind is at your back. So maybe talk about that. So last year alone, we have grown the business 21%, which is three times the market in terms of growth. And it's profitable growth because we are really a software-defined architecture. They're one of the core differentiators of the businesses. It's not really about wired or wireless. It's what do you enable the customer to do with this technology? And how agile can they be to use the technology to meet their business needs? And there's a lot of conversation, obviously, as part of HPE around the data center and what's happening there with hybrid IT. The intelligent edge is the complement of that. The simple way to think about the intelligent edge is IT technology, which is hardware, software, services that goes outside the data center that's closer to the user and delivers basically on the business outcomes with digital initiatives that our customers are looking at. So I'll give you some examples. One is in the enterprise itself. The most simple example is take a workplace, take an office and transform the office in some way. And the easiest way to do it is get it off your cubicle farms with desktops and mobile devices, make it an open collaborative workplace, which is what everybody wants. And oh, by the way, as you start to do this, not only do you raise the productivity of your workforce, but you make it more attractive to attract and retain the best and brightest from the new workforce that is graduating from colleges that are looking for these work environments. And the other upshot is that you have an idea of where people are, not only who is getting onto the network, but with wireless, you know where they are. That gives you a sense of how your real estate is being utilized, which I didn't know this, but it was basically you used to hire people to watch how people moved around and do like six month studies of if your real estate is being used appropriately or not, now you get it real time with analytics. And you can use that location to really create new workflows within the enterprise that are completely not known. An example is conference rooms. If you look at how people book conference rooms, you go to your calendar and exchange and book it. The meeting may or may not happen, but the meeting is booked anyway. And so we flipped the model and I said, instead of booking meetings two weeks in advance before they happen, how about we turn it around and make it just in time? Just like taxi cabs or limousine rides, right? They used to be, you had to book it in advance. Now with Uber, you just hail it right whenever you want. You can do the same thing with conference rooms. Another example was not only do you book the conference room but you can turn up the lights, turn up the AC. So a lot of IoT elements to the workplace. So a very simple prosaic things like a workplace can be completely modernized using this technology. So that's an example of an intelligent edge. Another is in retail where customers want to, our customers in that industry want to use the network, the wireless channel to increase the engagement for the shoppers when they enter the stores. Today, if you look at a bricks and mortar experience, you walk into a store, it is totally disconnected. Whereas if you're shopping online on Amazon, let's say, right? It has your shopping history. It'll give you recommendations. It's a very modern sort of shopping experience. So how do you bring that online experience to the offline world and make it real time when you're out there, when you're touching and feeling the products, you get information about the products. You might get some promotions. You might be asked to consider accessories that go with the product that you might be buying. So it gives the retailer an ability to really engage with the shopper in real time. And that modernizes their business, right? So now you're talking about using IT to enhance revenue. So IT is no longer just a back office thing that you do. It's really to enhance the business itself. We're seeing this in industrial settings as well. Where the factory floor is being modernized to ensure that new workflows are coming in to ensure the plant equipment is being maintained correctly before things break down. So we see so much action, frankly, at the intelligent edge that in terms of just the market demand and the time, it's growing dramatically. Well, Peter, I mean, Kirti's describing when HPE bought Aruba, I said, is this a strategic infrastructure or is it just a great business? And you're describing as a strategic infrastructure. Yeah, but it's also a great business. So you weren't, you know, HPE might have originally thought that it was buying Aruba to buttress itself in the networking business, to help make the networking business happen. But what's occurred is Kirti and his team have helped catalyze this whole competency around the intelligent edge. And you mentioned a couple of things that I think are really interesting. First off, when we talk to CIOs and business people today, what they keep telling us is I need to think in terms of the event that I need to support and put processing compute right there at the moment. And I can't do that without great networking. So number one, network is a crucial feature of thinking differently about process and data, compute and data right there when the customer wants it. You mentioned the whole notion of retail. Well, I do this, I think we all do this. We go into the store, we get the tactile experience, we look at the price and we decide to go home and buy it somewhere else because it's more convenient. Lost opportunity for the retailer. You put compute and data right there and marry it with the tactile experience and you need Aruba-like technologies to make that happen. So talk a little bit about this idea of how it changes the way a business person thinks, how the intelligent edge is not just a technologist talking about stuff, but it's turn around. How is it a new way of thinking about business that then translates into the intelligent edge? Yeah, so I think today when you talk about digital, right, it's all about, I don't see in the future any business that is going to be independent of IT. IT used to be a support function, but every business in the world in 10 years. Can I take up on that really quick before you go? We talk about the difference between business and digital business is data, full stop. That's it. Data as an asset is the basis of digital business, otherwise it's all the same. What do you think? Exactly, so and data for powering experiences, that's kind of how we put it, right? That's really what it's about. You talked about the moment, right? So what do they want to capture? You know, if you look at retail, they want to capture the shopping experience. When you're in there, the data is about what they're interested in is in aggregate, where do my shoppers spend most of their time when they walk into my store? How long do they hang out? Do they come back? How often do they come back? This is analytics information that they can use to craft their campaigns, to bring more shoppers into the stores, right? This is data. The data comes based on when you walk into the store and the asset that allows this data to be built is the network. The moment you walk in, the network recognizes you that you walked in by your device. And it now knows how the path you're taking. I don't need to know you, Peter, walked, but I know that a shopper took this particular path and I collect enough data, I get patterns out of it. And based on the patterns, I then monetize it to bring the shoppers back. Now I married this data to my prior existing data, like a loyalty card database. If you're in my loyalty card database, then I know more about you, about your shopping habits, and that allows me to cross-sell and up-sell to you. So they look at this whole shopping, ultimately it's about business. It's about how do you increase the wallet share of your spend when you walk into the store and also to convert the sale. When you're there, not just do window shopping, walk off and purchase an Amazon, but make the sale happen. To do all of that, you need to crunch the data, you need to have super-fast networking to engage the customer, and all that needs to happen in real-time, right at that point in time. And that's what the edge is about. Do you know, have you heard the name, I'm going to throw something out, have you heard the name Christopher Alexander? Yeah. Timeless way of building, the whole notion that architecture is about creating spaces that are functional to people and make them convenient and attractive and useful. And in many respects what we're talking about is creating digital and real spaces combined at the same time that allows people to do things that are valuable to them. Fundamentally, do you agree with that? Is that kind of where we're going with this? Completely, completely. Digital, as I said, right, today we think of digital as an add-on to the space. In the future it'll be embedded, you won't even think about it, it'll just be there. And you'll just experience a digital space. It's putting the capabilities into the space that the customer, the employee, whoever needs to make that moment most valuable. And voice interfaces, if you think about Alexa and all these new things that are coming out, right? They're much more natural. You're not going like this, right? You're just walking in. You might have an Apple Watch on you. That's as good of a mobile device as a mobile phone, right? So I don't need you to be looking at anything. I just walk in, I can buzz your Apple Watch and say, hey, here's a coupon for you. Or you can just talk to a display and say, hey, tell me more about this product and you'll get information back. Kirti, bring it back to Discover. What are we going to hear this week from the audience? So one of the big things you'll hear from us is as you think about all these digital experiences that we're creating in whatever setting, there's one huge barrier to all of it. And guess what that is? Security. It is, absolutely. Security is the number one issue. And if you don't have a secure foundation, your digital business is at risk. And we have seen that in headlines, in bold headlines in the last year, two years, right? So how do you build security from the ground up and give you a super robust infrastructure that gives you what you want but doesn't compromise your business? That's fundamental. Security is a boardroom topic. The CEO has to respond to how you're ensuring consumer data is not being compromised. Patient data is not being compromised. Or whatever the sacrosanct data is that the enterprise owns about its customers. So we are talking about security and how you provide advanced machine learning and behavioral analytics capabilities to give you advanced warning about security threats that may be already inside the enterprise. Because there is no such enterprise today that is digital and not vulnerable. Everybody's vulnerable. And everybody knows there's a threat. The key is how long does it take you to figure out your, you have a threat and fix it. And we are helping them figure out faster and fix it faster. And you brought in some assets to do that, Niyara. We are going to be introducing this idea, this product called Introspect. We acquired Niyara, which brings us to the AI machine learning world into the enterprise. And the key idea there is that security doesn't stop at the perimeter. You really have to incorporate security from the internal, from the inside out, not just from the outside out. Great. Kirti, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. And good luck this week. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Peter and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from HPE Discover in Madrid. This is theCUBE.