When I founded Silver Peak 15 years ago, we set out on a singular mission: to help our customers build a better WAN. Our focus has been on architecting solutions, and building a company dedicated to connecting users to applications with greater ease, efficiency and effectiveness. We’ve done this through two generations of enterprise IT architecture, first with WAN optimization primarily focused on accelerating data center hosted applications, and then over the last five years with SD-WAN to address the broad adoption of cloud and SAAS services, and providing enterprises with a multiplier effect on their digital transformation initiatives. Everything we have done is with the goal of delivering the highest quality of experience to users when interacting with business applications and services in mind.
Over the years, we’ve built an incredible team that has culminated in making Silver Peak one of the leading SD-WAN providers in the world with more than 2,000 production customer deployments and counting. Through our focus and expertise, we are one of only two companies recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure for two years running now. Even with all of the success we’ve realized, our mission remains in the early stages of what we’re capable of delivering. Now is the time to accelerate.
Today, I am excited to announce that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has agreed to acquire Silver Peak for $925 million. From the start of my discussions with the HPE and Aruba team specifically, it immediately became clear that with our combined portfolio and complementary areas of expertise we will be able to accelerate growth faster than we possibly could on our own. Upon closing the deal, we will become part of HPE’s Aruba division, bringing together the industry’s most comprehensive end-to-end secure networking portfolio from the data center to the campus, to branch and remote worker locations.
Together, we will fully capitalize on the powerful combination of the Silver Peak team, the end-to-end Aruba portfolio, and the extensive capabilities across HPE to accelerate product development of future offerings in this fast-growing segment of the networking market. Our Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform is highly complementary to HPE’s industry-defining SD-Branch offerings and it will become the centerpiece of Aruba’s WAN edge strategy. In addition to accelerating our product development roadmap, we also share the same affinity for providing customers with the freedom of choice to seamlessly integrate technologies from our expansive ecosystem of technology alliance partners.
In his blog post today, Aruba Founder and President, Keerti Melkote summed it up well when he wrote: “we share the same vision and common goal – providing simplicity, scalability and application-awareness at the edge.”
As we work through the standard closing conditions, we will remain singularly focused on delivering the highest quality solutions to our customers that drive maximum value from their existing and ongoing cloud and digital transformation investments. These are exciting times at Silver Peak and for our industry. Now is the time for Silver Peak to capitalize on all of the great work we’ve been doing for the past 15 years and I couldn’t be more excited about the future.
I’m looking forward to joining Keerti and his team at Aruba and continuing to drive our vision forward, only-be-it with a lot more resources and much broader market reach.
The Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN Edge Platform has been named a leader for the second consecutive year in the Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. Get the full report.