 Hi, and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm Lisa Martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and John, but if you haven't, we're gonna dig into it from an analyst perspective. Joining me is Bob LaLiberte, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group to unpack the announcement. Bob, welcome to the program. Thank you very much. Great to be here. So in case anybody hasn't seen the announcement, go ahead and give me an overview. What are these two companies announcing? Yeah, absolutely. Essentially, what you've seen is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent NIC card basically, has taken their technology and incorporated into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services and all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on, combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. So you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure, and update and assign policies to all those great Pensando stateful services in a top of rack switch for an existing data center environment. And what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? Yeah, I really like this. I mean, the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyperscalers are doing. And the whole concept is around, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves? So I really find that this is something that's really needed. We've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed, but the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually going to run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications in their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies and the able organizations to do is to basically retrofit, if you will, that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me, deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch instead of having to either rely on existing, you know, hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that Goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of it's not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hairpinning through the core of your network, now you're just going to your top of rack switch. So it's going to improve the performance. Everybody wants improved performance, especially in the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So Bob, how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity it sounds like from what you're saying with which they can do that. Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally disruptive type of integration. Essentially what you're doing if you've got a high availability top of rack, you know, environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at a time. Organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case, it's simply going to be replacing a top of rack switch. And organizations could look at different ways of how they want to do this, you know, to start, they might want to look at where their critical applications are and deploy them there. So they've got the services. It might be based on looking at where, I don't know, you might have some regulated services, right? PCI, things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller, being able to spin that up, configure, apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and let it run. Talk to me about this in certain contexts and we know some of the industries, every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 18, 19 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, give me your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. Yeah, I mean, I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know, what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center, as they modernize their applications, right? So we've seen the transition from monolithic to SOA-based apps to microservices-based applications. And that's really what's driving this because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of communication within those applications themselves, right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right? Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication? How do you make sure that East West traffic is being fully protected? Because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat, protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter, right? Then the malware could really proliferate, proliferate, sorry, can't talk today. But the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that East West traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of RAC, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact, right? So I think that, you know, the zero trust is what it's, the mantra is never trust always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center, that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half. We've seen this massive spike in ransomware. It's companies in every industry now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in data. So let's kind of dig into, you mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance. Let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in a security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? Yeah, well, like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting, there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to make this change happen. So we've seen this in the hyperscalers, right? They've deployed the technology, they have it running in those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right? Unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive, this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally disruptive way? And that's what's really key here. The other interesting piece is because of the location, because they can track that east-west traffic and apply the security policies to it, and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it, they can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not gonna get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense in depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that capability and the functions that the hyperscalers have, and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments. And I think that's really what's important. And then like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, SEMs or things like that that can really help organizations, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. Because the more data you can collect, the better you can nail down the policies that need to be provided there. Well, and that's important too as every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not gonna be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication, you said this is gonna help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. Yeah, and it's like I said, it's really about having that full visibility into the East West flows for these, so and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows, right? And that can be complimented by the existing North-South firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack, where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center. So it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here. And again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload. So there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, really it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly once the technology is released by Aruba, they've got the ability to start deploying it. Obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack, adding some new capabilities, then certainly that's completely non-disruptive and they can get going there. But like I said, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organizations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability on top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non-disruptively. Excellent, that non-disruption augmentation is critical. I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HPE Aruba and Pensando. What does this signify on the HPE side in your opinion? Well, from the HPE side, like I said, I think this is a HPE has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage. And so what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HPE server environments, as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. Let's do one more thing, Bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways. If somebody has 30 to 60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement, what are those three things? Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architectures, right? But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that now this HPE Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way. And it provides you with the benefits of improving security, of improving performance and user experiences, all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives and we expect things to be able to work like that. Bob, thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HPE Aruba-Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. Very welcome. It's great to be here. Prabhava Liberty, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this HPE Aruba-Pensando announcement video.