 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Welcome back to HP Discover, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante, and this is theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is day two at HP Discover. Kurt Melkate is here. He's the founder and CTO of Aruba Networks and also Dominic Wild is the VP of Product Management, a CUBE alum. Good to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. So first of all, congratulations. Thank you. You must be thrilled. Absolutely, absolutely. We heard your colleague, Dom, yesterday, stole the show of the keynotes. You must have been very pleased with that. He came on theCUBE. He was great. Very engaging. He was great. Fantastic, right? I mean, real energy. And I think it's timely given this whole transformation of HP, you know, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. How do you feel? It's fantastic. I mean, just being here at Discover, looking at the number of attendees, just fantastic. We never could have done that at Aruba as a standalone company. At its height, I think we had 2,000 attendees in the audience, which is pretty good for us. And seeing 15,000 attendees take the show in and get the word out about Aruba is just a great feeling. So Dom, you've always been, I mean, frequently been the HP Discover. We've had you on theCUBE before as Aruba. How's it feel to be an HP now? Yeah, I know. I mean, so, you know, when we looked at acquiring Aruba and we looked at, you know, the reasoning behind it and everything, I mean, the opportunity in wireless is just huge. The growth in that space is enormous. One of the fastest growing segments in networking. So we needed to take a long, hard look at what we were doing at HP in the segment. And while, you know, we did well, we had good, you know, decent solutions. What Aruba really brings to the table is a true mobility first solution, going above and beyond just a connectivity capabilities, but also providing significant value add in terms of, you know, the mobile capability and the mobile needs of end users. So it's actually very complimentary to what we've been doing in HP in the data center space, where, you know, in data center, people are moving to cloud and they're doing that because they're trying to create agile application environments. And any investment that you make there is not fully realized if you don't have that last mile delivery and you don't meet the expectations of the end users in terms of their experience of those applications. And so you need a truly mobile experience. And this is what Aruba brings to the table, which is why it's such a great compliment to us. So Kirti, as an entrepreneur, you want to win. I mean, that's all you're in the game to win, right? So talk about how you win, you know, with HP. The decision to obviously sell the company, I mean, obviously it was a bigger decision than just yours, but what was the thinking, what was the vision in terms of that winning strategy? Yeah, I mean, if you look at why Aruba got started in the first place, we made the observation a decade ago that the world, if it could, go wireless, would go wireless and stay mobile. And the observation was based on a simple fact that in our personal lives, we were all getting used to cell phones, but at work, we were all sitting at our desks, computing, and the more natural way to compute and communicate was being mobile. And unfortunately at the time, the only device that would connect over a Wi-Fi network was a laptop. And it was not until the iPhone and the iPad were introduced to the market that true mobility started to take shape. And where we are today in the market, the need for connecting, sitting at a desk and connecting to a network is not needed anymore. You can be anywhere, anytime, and stay connected over a Wi-Fi network. And that is fundamentally disruptive to Cisco, right? Cisco's business is built on a wired foundation with wireless as a little flavoring added on top of it, right? And we take a different approach. We basically say mobility first, which means you really don't need all the phones, the phones on the desk, the computers. What you have is already on your person. Just walk around with it and stay connected. And that disrupts a significant revenue stream that Cisco has, and it's something Cisco simply can't embrace at a business level. And that's where we started to, if you might have read a book called The Innovator's Dilemma, which is really the essence of the strategy behind Aruba. It is disruptive, we are going to go there. And what we needed was the scale. We have about 15% market share as a standalone company, but to really win, we needed to be much higher than that. And at this stage of our company, we needed a partner who we could scale to the large, very large enterprises with and also to the very small enterprises where you need the channels to be able to go to market with. And HP has both. And they had the thirst to actually come seek us out and partner with us. And we were already OEM partners and it was already working. And this is a natural next move for us to come closer with HP. So Dominic, I want to get HP's perspective on this. I mean, the acquisition of 3Com got you into the networking business in a big way, but the positioning generally, I mean, I'm simplifying, was that, hey, we're an alternative, Cisco. Okay, great. And we have advantages. And we could be a second provider or a lower cost provider. Great, good. Everybody needs a number two. And I said off camera, I see Aruba is a totally different stretch. It's a judo move against Cisco's wired first strategy. Kirti, what you were saying was the cherry on top for wireless. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So I agree with you. I mean, when we acquired 3Com, we got to broaden the portfolio and get depth in the portfolio so as we could be a strong challenge. Get in the game, right? Yeah, it's getting the game to be a strong challenger. The strategy that we executed with that portfolio was one of being the open alternative to Cisco. So Cisco being very proprietary, driving lock-in. What we did with the HP portfolio was drive an open agenda. And this is why we're such proponents of SDN. So it was a little more than just being the alternative, but we've driven that strategy now for five years. It's actually been five years since the 3Com acquisition. But you're absolutely right. And I like the term judo move here for the Aruba acquisition. What I think we learned on the way is that to really, really beat Cisco, you got to get some focus. You got to get into a portion of the market where there is an inflection and you got to get in with an offering that is significantly differentiated and is viewed as having tremendous value by the customer base. And it's all of those pieces that Aruba really fit. And so this is an opportunity for us to throw Cisco to the map. It is an opportunity for us to provide the Aruba product portfolio with a much broader channel and a much broader opportunity globally. I mean, they've done tremendous work growing the company to the size of the business they have and the velocity of that growth has been amazing. But we're just going to accelerate that and then enhance our open approach with the capabilities of Aruba. And we talk about this, you know, we live in a data-driven world and decisions are made with data, but when you guys started the company, like I said, there were no iPhones, no smartphones, but I think it was the Intel, was it the Centrino, was the catalyst. Okay, I remember the Centrino like, eh, meh. Okay. It was a big move for a while. It was about your lives, your professional lives on this, right? But somehow in your gut, you saw the potential coming. The generation mobile has been a huge tailwind for you. Where do you see it going? It doesn't feel like it's going to stop here. No, I think Gen Mobile to me is here and now. It's happening with everybody connecting over the Wi-Fi network. Where it's headed though, it's not just about people connecting. IoT. It's IoT, right? Everything around you is going to be on the network and guess what? It's all going to be on Wi-Fi. And Wi-Fi or ZigBee are some form of wireless communication. It's not going to be on the wired side. And as it comes into the enterprise, we see traffic increasing on the wireless side dramatically over the wired network. And that's again, if you're a CIO looking at your enterprise network and going, here's my investment. I'm putting a ton of money at people's desks whereas all the action is away from the desk. So why don't I shift my investments to where the action is? And with IoT, the business cases are pretty significant, right? It's not just about people connecting. One of the big things we can bring with Wi-Fi is the idea of location enablement. Figuring out where a person or a thing is. And based on that, you can do very interesting things like asset management, asset movement and tracking, people movement and tracking. And if you're a retailer, you can actually use that to engage with your customers when they come onsite to your retail stores and so on. So I think networks in general with mobility are moving away from just being a passive conduit to the internet to being an active participant in the business aspect of itself, enhancing the revenue of the business that you ran. It's interesting, John Furrier, my co-host here, had a leave, his daughter's graduated from Palo Alto High School today, so he had a split. But we were talking about and sort of debating the idea economy. I really liked it. He thought it was a little bit of, you know, sort of fuzzy. But the interesting thing to me, another book, you may have read, The Second Machine Age, Eric Minyolson and Andy McAfee and the whole concept of the book is you basically take these ideas and you combine other technologies to look at, you guys have been using Uber as an example, but Waze is another good example, you know, social media and GPS and so forth. And then you enable this, in this idea economy, the digitization of businesses. HP is playing a huge role in that, I would think, in this IoT, I think of CIF sensors. What's the HP angle here? Can you talk about that a little bit, Dominic, and add some color to that? Yeah, so one of the challenges of IoT is the volume of data that it generates. It's what do you do with that data and how do you make it meaningful and useful? And so obviously, the big data strategies that we have, the cloud enablement that we have to be able to access that data through the cloud and take action on it and be able to sort of sort through the data are all very relevant to the bigger HP. The role that HP networking obviously takes is actually sort of getting down to how do you deploy sensors? How do you get that sort of first mile connectivity to sensors? And I think a great example of this that, Kirti, I think you can talk to, is what a Ruber has done at Levi Stadium for the 49er Stadium. I mean, it's just a tremendous story in terms of how you've built incredible business value on a sort of simple stadium Wi-Fi enablement. Well, this is a great example because the Dallas Cowboys here, let's build the biggest giant screen we can, which we all know is going to be outdated in a few years. What did Levi Stadium do? So Levi's had an interesting angle. They wanted to provide Wi-Fi that worked. That was step one, right? And getting Wi-Fi to work in a high density environment like that is non-trivial to do. So we were able to accomplish that. There's some very innovative designers in our company that were able to go in there and figure out how do you fit 80,000 people watching and enjoying a game in that bowl and make it work. So that was done, but what they wanted to do was to extend the network to truly engage the fan base. One very common problem if you've been to a game is you want to order food or a beer. You have to go out of your seat, miss the game, stand in line to order, and then stand in line, wait in line again to pick up. And there goes 15 minutes, maybe a quarter is done. You guarantee your team's going to store when you do that. So if you're behind by touchdown, go get a beer. Exactly. So they wanted to simplify that. And how do you do that? Basically, you open your phone, open the Levi's app, and order whatever you want. And you have the option of having the food delivered to you in your seat, or having it picked up at the closest stall to you. Now how do you figure out where you are, or what the closest stall to where your sitting is? And that's where location technology comes in, right? Aruba has SDKs where they actually integrated that into the app. So now we can signal to the app that says this person is here. So bring their food order to the closest location to where they're sitting. Not only that, tell them how to get to their food order so they don't have to wait in line and just pick it up and save a ton of time, right? So that's one very good example where they were able to generate over a million dollars in the first season through food orders from that app. There's incremental revenues that they probably would not have had. Now, the other thing they told us when we interviewed the folks at Levi's Stadium from the Giants, sorry, the 49ers, they were saying that they also want to drive video to the seat, which is the most frustrating thing I love to go to games, but a close play, they don't show it. Come on, show the play. Plus you've been sitting in the wrong camera angle, right? So what they're doing is they capture the game from multiple camera angles and they stream all of that over the air. So you can select on your phone or your tablet which camera angle do you want to be on and what's the replays? It's like sitting on your couch and enjoying the game. That is awesome. That's going to change the fan viewing experience in the NFL, which is obviously one of the greatest sports in this country. How did you, at a high level, make Wi-Fi work? What were the challenges you faced in making Wi-Fi work in a stadium like that? We can all relate. I mean, we're here. It's very difficult to get out. Yeah, if you're going to stadiums, even cell phones don't work today. You can't even get a text message. By the way, this is all a Ruba Wi-Fi. Yeah, okay. Well actually, we have a local Wi-Fi here. We don't need to use it. Good. We have the Q Wi-Fi, we don't need to use it. Here's the challenge. Basically, you have to figure out how to trick physics. I mean, what happens is you're sitting around. Radio communications all happen on the same spectrum. I mean, we are on Wi-Fi. We're all sharing the same channel, same amount of bandwidth. And the trick is how do you reuse the bandwidth? Because if you have 80,000 people on a single channel with one access point, you can't get a single packet out. And so that text message will never get out. But what people want to be able to do is tweet their photographs or a play that just happened to either real time or real time. And so that requires a lot more bandwidth. So what we do is basically create these very small cells where you're sharing bandwidth with roughly 50 people around you. And to do that, you need to have access points that pick up the traffic around the 50 people where you're sitting. And then the next 50 pick up the next access point and so on. So the trick is in designing a system that allows you to do that efficiently. In technology we call it, it's called reuse. Where you're reusing the channel over and over and over again and getting the multiplier effect. The very interesting thing that we found was the effect was people are attenuators of the signal. So the idea is the signal should not propagate and it should actually be contained. And so the access points are located underneath the seats. And so when you're sitting there enjoying the game, people act as natural attenuators and the cell sizes shrink. It's funny, when the people are there, there's more capacity in the network. So you localized the cell capacities, rethought the architecture of how you would approach this problem, thought about it differently and then solved it. Yeah, basically you go in there and figure out what it is and interestingly density actually increases capacity because the people are part of the solution. Right, right, more people, more capacity. As opposed to brute forcing it. As opposed to brute forcing it with antennas, very fancy antennas, very complicated algorithms which make it more expensive and more difficult to work with. This was a feat of really both engineering on the software side and engineering on the implementation side to get it all together. Now have you been able to, I presume, you're commercializing that in other use cases, right? Here's one. What about the business case, Dominic? I mean, when you talk to, well, first of all, who do you talk to and how are you making the business case? For the customer base, I mean, it's really, so a lot of the business case is generated from sort of C level downwards as it were. There's a couple of different ways this can come in. You know, C level executives wanting to add additional value to the line of business. So wanting to be able to be revenue generating, generate new and innovative services in a business. And mobility is an easy sort of, it's easy to imagine many different ways you can do that in different verticals. The other way it comes in is from the user base. If you take the education environment, for example, as an interesting challenge there, is the user base is, you would think at a university, for instance, would be in the classroom, in the lecture hall, doing work. But a big challenge is what happens in the dorm rooms at night where suddenly all the wireless traffic explodes because everybody's streaming their Netflix and those users in the dorm have an expectation that they will get the same level of service level and attention as they get when they're in the classroom. They expect to be able to work anytime, any place. And so a lot of times the demand is driven from the user base. And then it's very easy then to make a business case to a customer to go in and say, look, rather than just providing raw connectivity and raw bandwidth, what you want to do is you want to be able to provide a service and a service level that your end user will appreciate and potentially pay for. So can you get those students in the dorm room to actually pay now for the explosion of bandwidth that they're using while the university funds what is used in the campus? There's examples like that. You can now differentiate the types of things that people are doing and where they're doing it. And so we can now start to tie identity into the network. We can start to tie that identity to the application usage. And it's very easy to then build very specific business cases around different use cases. So finishing up here, let's talk about the new portfolio. How does Aruba sort of change the portfolio of HP? Maybe talk about where it fits. How do you describe the portfolio? It kind of dramatically enhances the portfolio. So you used to come in with what you said before was you've got alternatives, you're more open, boom. What's the elevator pitch now? And specifically describe the portfolio to a customer. So I think Dominic Orr and Keir to use a wonderful term, which is the mobile-first network. And I think that is the new paradigm in networking. It is having a network that is designed mobile-first. So rather than thinking of it the other way around, which is I have a wired infrastructure and I've got a bolt-on wireless, think the other way around. So that's really the elevator pitch, is think mobile-first and design from there in. The portfolio is, again, we have very comprehensive portfolio, but the Aruba surf is a very complimentary add-on. We're now able to take things like the clear-pass policy management that Aruba has that allows you to describe very simple business policy and translate that into the infrastructure. We're able to bring our switching infrastructure underneath that. And so we're going to go through the process of bringing all these things together, taking the best of what we've had at HP from the wired side with the best of the mobility capabilities from Aruba and bringing that all together. And it is a very, very comprehensive and coherent end-to-end value proposition because as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't just stop in the campus and the mobile environment, it goes all the way back to the value proposition of why you're deploying cloud and why you're actually doing cloud-native applications to deliver them in a mobile environment. So it's a really comprehensive end-to-end solution. So I said earlier yesterday, I said I thought that Aruba could be HP Networking's three-par. And I still believe that in terms of the potential and I think it could exceed that. But initially, three-par was kind of left alone, kind of do its own thing. And now after several years, it's starting to integrate much more fully. It sounds like it's not a leave-alone strategy for Aruba. It's much more active than that. We're going to keep the brand alive. I mean, the brand is a significant adder to the whole value proposition. People believe in the Aruba brand. And so I think that is going to remain just like three-par has continued to exist. But I think the integration will be far, far faster in terms of the product portfolios, right? Because we go in there today as Aruba and say here is the mobility overlay on top of your fixed network, right? And we didn't care whose fixed network it was. Now we do. We can actually go in there and say here is the end-to-end solution. Right. Right, based on open principles. So you still have choice. You don't have to lock yourself in. But it's the best-of-breed open solution out there. Excellent, okay. We have to leave it there. The collision of cloud, networking, enterprise, mobility, gentlemen. Congratulations, great acquisition. Congratulations on taking the next step with your company, Kirti. And really pleasure speaking with you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. All right, keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest is theCUBE, we're live from HP Discover. Right back.