Aruba Again Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure

September 22, 2021 – Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) company, announced today that HPE (Aruba and Silver Peak) has been named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. This is the fourth consecutive year that HPE (Aruba and Silver Peak) has been named a Leader in the Magic Quadrant report released by Gartner, the world’s most authoritative IT research and consulting company.

Aruba is one of only two vendors to be named a leader four years in a row since the report was published four years ago, further validating Aruba's acquisition of Silver Peak. Gartner believes that it is precisely because of the acquisition of Silver Peak that HPE (Aruba and Silver Peak) has demonstrated high market visibility based on customer consultation and online conversation analysis.

The Magic Quadrant (MQ) report released by Gartner provides insights into the direction, maturity and participants of a market through visual introductions, in-depth analysis and actionable recommendations. In the Magic Quadrant report on WAN edge infrastructure, Gartner evaluated 15 vendors based on "completeness of vision" and "ability to execute" as the main criteria. The report not only includes an introduction to each vendor, but also evaluates the vendor's industry advantages and matters that customers should pay attention to.

Gartner said: "The WAN edge infrastructure market continues to migrate from traditional branch routers used to connect branch offices and data centers (often referred to as 'customer edge routers' in multiprotocol label switching implementations) to software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) that support more distributed architectures and cloud workloads. Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) are widely replacing edge routers and adding application-aware path selection, centralized orchestration and local security capabilities across multiple links, as well as other performance-optimizing features (such as WAN optimization)."

Additionally, Gartner updated several strategic planning assumptions in this year’s report, including: “By 2024, more than 70% of software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) customers will implement a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, up from 40% in 2021.”

As a leader in wired and wireless networking, Aruba is also actively deploying SASE. In April this year, Aruba ESP launched a series of cross-product, edge-to-cloud security function integrations and a number of innovative improvements, including the integration of the ClearPass Policy Manager secure network access control platform with the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, and the integration of Aruba Threat Defense with the EdgeConnect platform. It also expanded Aruba ESP's multi-vendor security partner ecosystem, allowing enterprise customers to freely deploy their chosen best-of-breed cloud-delivered secure access service edge (SASE) security components.

Aruba combines zero-trust security and SD-WAN through SASE. SASE integrates network technology and network security technology and delivers them through the cloud, which simplifies the architecture and enables it to scale rapidly. Enterprise customers can apply identity-based granular security policies from edge to cloud to securely connect and protect users and devices.

“Aruba’s SD-WAN portfolio enables organizations of all sizes, across all industries, to address a wide range of use cases, no matter where they are in their digital transformation journey,” said David Hughes, chief product and technology officer at Aruba. “Being named a Leader for four consecutive years further validates that our edge-to-cloud vision is not only feasible, but also empowers organizations to gain competitive advantage in an ever-changing business environment.”

Xie Jianguo, President of Aruba China, also said: "Aruba focuses on innovation in network solutions and hopes to become a partner in the digital transformation of industry users. With our in-depth exploration of customer needs and unremitting pursuit of product innovation, we have gained industry recognition and customer trust. In the future, Aruba will continue to pay attention to the cutting-edge trends in the development of network technology, constantly improve various solutions, and help customers more calmly cope with the challenges of the digital transformation era."