Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

That's right.

Augmenting the capabilities of an engineer or an operator to do more with what they've been given and obviously make better use of the time that they have to do it.

Yes. There's a quote I heard, and I don't know who to attribute it to. But it was along the lines of you won't lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to somebody who's more effectively using AI. So I think it's really important for CEOs to invest in enabling their organization with technology that's leveraging AI. And I think at HPE Aruba Networking, we've invested a lot into innovating in this area. You often hear that with artificial intelligence, it's only as good as the amount of data that you have because if you want to learn, you need to learn from a lot of examples. And in Aruba Central, we are now managing on order of 3.5 million devices, so -- and all of those devices are streaming telemetry day in, day out. And so we have a wealth of data. And that's a huge advantage as we train our artificial intelligence to derive insights for those admins where we can recommend, based on what we are seeing, ways that they could improve the configuration of the network, improve the reliability of the network. And obviously, at this point, a lot of customers are more comfortable being kind of in the loop of deciding, yes, I want to accept that recommendation. But we've also added the ability to have a check box of if you find the situation in the future, have the AI remediate it automatically. And so...

It's to truly get to kind of the closed loop.

Yes.

That's just fantastic. So that's taking all of that data, right, all that telemetry, obviously using a model and allowing it to learn about all of the different permutations and then feeding back true intelligence that's going to help enable the network engineer and eventually get to a level of trust between that artificial and the human in order to actually say, yes, I trust you. Go ahead and do that. Change on my behalf.

Yes. That's right. And then another -- while we're on AI, another whole -- there's so many kinds of AI, right? But this year has really been the year of GenAI. And I think in networking and security, where you're really seeing that emerge in 2024 is in improvements and advancements in the natural language interfaces. I mean I think most people these days already have a natural language interface, but there's always room to improve. And being able to allow the admin to ask very simple questions and get instant answers that are super targeted at what they're looking for is going to make it much easier for them. They're not having to screen through tons and tons of tables of information or go through extensive documentation doing Google searches, which may or may not yield a relevant answer. They're able to get that answer in the console that they're using with the full context of the situation, all of the metadata as well as documentation, coupled together with generative AI-powered back-end is, I think, what we're looking forward to.

Right. I mean it's just like having another team member, right? And that team member is artificial, but you're able to communicate with that team member and actually get the answer just like I would if I was reaching over the cube wall and talking to one of my colleagues. It's just a case of, hey, what are we seeing right now in this particular situation and here comes the data stream of what it's seeing so that you can then react to it.

Yes. Yes. So I think this is going to be a great thing for the IT admin. It will make them more effective in their job. And make it less frustrating, less time doing tedious things and more time doing those interesting things that help move the business forward.

And that's really the key point, right? Everything we want to do with this -- the whole predictions really is how do we move the business forward. How do we make it have that agility and flexibility that it needs in order to do whatever is coming next for them?

Yes.

So with that, David, I say, thank you very much for joining me today.

Well, thanks, James. It's been great to go through these predictions with you.

Well, there you go. There is 5 networking predictions to look out for and to help you prepare for 2024. Now before we move on to the next segment, the live translation is online. So select your local language from the drop-down box, and make sure you mute the original audio so you can hear it in your preferred language. Okay. So moving forward now, we're going to introduce Elissa McCormick, our Solutions Advocacy Lead for APJ, who's going to talk through the more relevant opportunities for you to accelerate your network transformation. So let's hand over to Elissa. But just one quick -- one more reminder. [Operator Instructions] But without further ado, let's hand it over to Elissa.

Thank you, Alex, and welcome, everyone. And yes, I am looking forward to seeing your questions into the Q&A. David has certainly shared some bold predictions for 2024, and I'd like to take the next 20 minutes or so to explore how HPE Aruba Networking can help you and your organizations prepare for and, in some cases, take advantage of what comes next. Next, there's been a fundamental shift in how and where we're working. We're working from anywhere, and the applications that we're accessing are everywhere. Consider, just for a moment, how many SaaS applications your teams are consuming today. These applications and services are being consumed from both the cloud and also from the Internet in some cases. And in that instance, it is absolutely imperative that security also follows that trend. So it is in this context that we're starting to see organizations rethinking their investment and also sizing of dedicated firewall appliances. Next slide. So over the past -- sort of recognizing this need to move security into the cloud, probably about the middle of last year, we extended our portfolio to include some Secure Services Edge solutions or SSE solutions. And the intent here is to enable your organization to secure the connectivity or the access between the end user, the employee and the application whether that application is in your data center, whether it's in the cloud, co-hosted or somewhere out on the Internet. This concept includes a number of capabilities, and I'll just touch on a couple here. The first one is what you see, ZTNA, and that is Zero Trust Network Access. And this offers secure connectivity to internal applications. So just imagine for a minute that you have the ability to keep contractors off your internal network while providing them with secure access to applications that are hosted in your data center. The other one that I just wanted to touch on, you see the term SWG, S-W-G, or Secure Web Gateway. This is really centered on protecting employees from Internet-based threats. So again, consider an educational environment. Okay? Whilst the student is at school, they are -- there is a duty of care. Their access to the Internet is highly controlled. With the SWG, the Secure Web Gateway, we're able to extend that duty of care to the students as they're working outside of the school premises. So the next section to touch on is the -- what we're doing from a location-based perspective. Okay? So we've secured the connectivity between the end users and the applications. The next step is to secure and optimize connectivity between locations. These locations could be remote workers. They could be branch offices and also even between data centers. So when we -- the objective here from an SD-WAN perspective is really to modernize the network edge. We're replacing those traditional single-purpose appliances and incorporating routing, firewalling, WAN optimization and visibility into that secure appliance to allow for that end-to-end connectivity. Now when we bring both SD-WAN capabilities and SSE capabilities, the result is a unified approach to SASE, Secure Access Service Edge. Next. Now whilst we've spoken about the move to cloud and the need to secure connectivity to cloud-based applications, we also need to consider those applications and devices that are still on-prem. So to this, we have invested heavily in a capability called Aruba Central NetConductor. And here, we're giving organizations the ability to centrally define and deploy policies across their entire organization. So the end result is a single policy framework. The value add for Aruba customers is the ability to bring to life the in-built security capabilities within your existing switching gateways and access points. We know that traditional networking technologies such as VLANs and ACLs are inadequate today to segment different types of traffic. So we've introduced this concept of roles, so being able to profile what is connecting to the network, classify it, authenticate it and then give at least privilege access to the resources it needs based on roles. So this type of segmentation, while -- is really built for those devices that communicate on-premise. So it's focused on reducing the proliferation of any security breaches in the east-west direction. The Aruba Central NetConductor is a full-stack cloud-native security solution that, as I've mentioned, automates the configuration of your wired, wireless and WAN infrastructure. Now being able to secure or essentially define and deploy policies is one aspect. The second area that David mentioned was the ability to recognize applications and also control them, so understanding what applications are traversing the network, having visibility into those applications and then being able to optimize those that are critical for the organization. The second prediction was that Zero Trust principles accelerate the alignment of security and networking objectives. David touched on the contentious objectives that -- between the security team and the networking team. And if we think about their fundamental roles, the security team -- sorry, the networking team is really about enabling devices and things to connect to applications and services. The security team has very much a focus on risk mitigation, compliance. And in many cases, a poor user experience can be the result of an accidental denial of access to particular services. So we've taken a slightly different approach, next slide, to bring about a common architecture that is designed to align these 2 teams, being your security team and your networking team. With a security-first approach to networking that's built on Zero Trust principles within security that is embedded into the network fabric. So let's just build out this slide a little bit and take a look at some of the key components of this architecture. So Zero Trust is underpinning this architecture. It is a concept, as I've mentioned, of providing least privileged access for employees to be productive or for a device to securely communicate with its respective application. Based on the -- for Zero Trust to be effective, it must be applied consistently at every point in the network. And it's really focused on those devices or things that data needs -- their data needs to remain on-premise. And in this context, the security capabilities need to be embedded into the networking infrastructure, be it the gateway, the access point and also the switching fabric. The outcomes of this security-first approach to networking are comprehensive visibility. The IT team and the security team have access to the same insights. They see the same telemetry that's coming in from the infrastructure. I've touched on the need and the value of a global policy, being able to define policies -- security policies centrally and then have them deployed across the organization and enacted or executed on the network fabric. It realizes that edge-to-cloud environment that we're operating in. So we've touched on how we are securing the connectivity between end users and cloud applications. This is really extending that so that we're now looking at securing the connectivity between the devices and things on the network that need to communicate with each other, maybe devices in the data center or, again, with services in the cloud, and of course, leveraging AI operations to automate this entire policy execution. So one example around AI automation is the ability to classify -- visualize and classify and profile the devices that are coming into the network, being able to provide visibility if there are increasing threats, being able to provide IT with insights that alert them to potential security risks. So next slide, how do we put this all together? Okay. On a security-first networking approach encompasses all of the people and things that are connecting to the network. It's not specific to one type of access. It's not specific to those that are coming in via VPN or those that are only connecting via wireless. It is across any type of access. So regardless how that device or thing actually connects to the network, a security policy is implemented. And the enforcement, as I've mentioned, is done on the existing infrastructure. So taking this conversation, going beyond the edge and into the cloud is where we start looking at the SSE cloud enforcement. So leveraging security capabilities in the cloud, leveraging the ability to set standard security policies across the organization regarding how clients and users access applications that are in the cloud. And of course, we have all of those different sources of data and applications that clients and things are trying to connect to. Now if we go to the next slide, we can quickly see just how this is being put together. So on the far left-hand side, again, it's looking at the various options around how devices and things are connecting to the network. We want to be able to visualize everything that is coming into the network. Once we've visualized it, we then look at segmenting it. So being able to segment your guest traffic from your POS traffic. And not just in one branch, not just if that device is connecting on a switch, but end-to-end, across the entire organization. And then finally, looking or leveraging our extensive ecosystem partners to integrate their security solutions into your fabric. So you're starting to get that end-to-end security from the networking perspective. There could be MDM integrations. It could be integrations with firewalls such as Palo Alto or even some application visibility solutions as well in the data center. So really looking at not only what are we doing from an Aruba perspective, but how we are extending security by working with a number of these integration partners. Next slide, please. So the next prediction from David is the need to measure end users' experience and how it is becoming a driving force for operational excellence. So next slide, let's just take a look at what we mean by this sort of digital experience, okay. Today, there is a continued trend for enterprises and organizations to digitize manual processes. We saw a huge uptick of this trend around the COVID time when the -- many organizations were forced to make this change. So we need to now catch up on how are we measuring the end users experiencing accessing these digital resources. So one example that I'd like to give is think of a warehousing. A person is scanning in inventory, okay? They're no longer writing it down, but they're using scanners to scan it in. If those scans don't go through, that is, a, productivity impacting; and b, a poor end user experience for the pickup. So when we're thinking of digital experience and measuring digital experience, it's really around 3 key areas. The first one is the ability to measure the end users. So what is the network? What is the application like for the end user? And to this, we have a number of sensors, which I'll touch on. The ability to do synthetic transaction monitoring. So rather than running agents across the entire organization, rather than having some script tests running, being able to synthetically recreate the workflows that the employees are enacting to access applications and be productive within the organization. And then, of course, there's endpoint monitoring. And it is in this context that agents really come to the forefront. So we'll just build this slide out. Okay. So the solution to do that is our user experience insight. We have dedicated hardware sensors that act like an IT person sitting in your organization, testing connectivity to your network services and also your critical applications, whether they be internal or cloud-hosted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It reports the results of those applications to the dashboard that you see. The smiley face representation gives you at-a-glance notification of if all is good within that branch, floor, hallway, foyer, or whether there are issues that IT needs to start doing some triage. Leveraging one of our strategic partnerships with Zebra, we've jointly collaborated on an agent for Zebra handhelds because we know that, that scenario that I gave previously about the scanners not scanning through consistently and impacting productivity, that's a challenge. So we want to be able to provide visibility into, well, what is the performance of the network when I am standing in aisle 3 on warehouse 2. When I'm on the phone, what is the performance of my voice call as I'm walking around the warehouse? So giving those sorts of insights to those organizations who have adopted Zebra as their preferred handheld provider, and then, of course, having the ability to run agents on Android devices. So a bit of a sneak peak. You'll see us continue to release some new agents in a few months' time that will start giving us some more insights into what's happening on your employee and corporate-issued devices. So when we think about this user experience insight, how does it actually work? So we have these sensors, and they can either be dedicated sensors that you see there in white or they could be agents running on devices, and they onboard to any network. So just like your phone connects to any vendor's wireless network, these devices also connect to any vendor's wired or wireless network. It tests the critical applications, so those applications that are absolutely priority for your organization. And then as I've mentioned, it reports on the status of those applications and also the availability and performance or reachability of those applications as well. And it offers a number of outcomes, particularly around change management. So for those of you who are on the call with an IT role, being able to understand the impact of changes that you might have made to AP configuration or firmware upgrades, has that had a positive or a negative impact on your end user constituency. Now the opportunity for our Aruba customers is to have this end-to-end visibility -- next slide, please, where we're able to provide the end user's perspective using the UXI and also the performance and availability of the networking infrastructure with HPE Aruba networking Aruba Central. So having these 2 forms of visibility and insights coming in gives IT the ability to see end to end. So what is the experience like for an end user? And how is my network performing? Are there any trends that I need to be made aware of? Being able to base line and then give examples or alerts where there's been a high deviation from what is considered normal. So in summary, given that end-to-end visibility is available with UXI and also with Aruba Central. Next slide, please. The next prediction is that 6 gigahertz Wi-Fi adoption is skyrocketing and will continue to be the biggest feature of Wi-Fi 7. And this is quite an interesting prediction. And I think to help us get a little bit more context around sort of what David is inferring here, we should take a look at the overall Wi-Fi 7 adoption across the world. Next slide, please. So what you'll see here is from the Wi-Fi org. And it is indicating the availability of the 7,000 megahertz, which is what is required for Wi-Fi 7, across the globe. And I'd like to draw your attention, those countries that are in green, they have -- or that has already been adopted. From a regulatory perspective, that spectrum is available. Just have a glance at the Asia Pacific region. So you'll notice that there are a few countries who have sort of a striped coloring. Those are countries that have adopted or allowed for the Wi-Fi 6E spectrum but have -- still considering the 7,000 megahertz that's required for Wi-Fi 7. Now what are some of the sort of considerations as organizations or enterprises that we need to think about. Firstly, the fact that there's limited Wi-Fi 7 spectrum approved across the globe. It uses very large channels, which means that there are less overlapping channels available for us to use across the enterprise. The third is their built-in features that require the end client's support in order to take advantage of them, and also, there are new power requirements for the access points. So that is the reason why Wi-Fi 6E is -- still remains the leading feature of Wi-Fi 7. So if we look at some of the use cases that we have there that are available today with Wi-Fi 6E being the ability to do low latency calling, next-generation experiences, having the throughput, the capacity to be able to use things like AR and VR and also multi-gig capacity for larger environments. Think of the lecture theaters at universities. So today, with Wi-Fi 6E, we're able to address the majority of the enterprise requirements. Next slide, please. In doing so, we have a comprehensive portfolio. Starting from the left -- far left-hand side with a very compact access point that I think is great for those pop-up scenarios. Think of instances where you need Wi-Fi connectivity on demand. It could be that there is a team of students going out to do some research and they need some Wi-Fi connectivity to be able to collaborate, to be able to then send information back to the university. Pop-up stores also need Wi-Fi connectivity or POS terminals, handheld devices, et cetera. So being able to have that capability to add in a SIM card and then have Wi-Fi connectivity on demand, all the way through to enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6E cable access points. So you'll notice that the entire portfolio has been certified. So you have assurance that the Wi-Fi standards has been adhered to across the Aruba range. So if we go to the next slide, we're really starting to extend connectivity capabilities. Gone are the days where access points are just used to connect Wi-Fi-based devices. Where we are heading and what is available today is the ability to connect non-Wi-Fi devices to your IT infrastructure. So these could be your BLE sensors. They could be Zigbee door locks or they could have specific use cases like air monitoring, as an example, via a USB connection. So the value proposition of having this capability is twofold. One, it is an investment protection because we're leveraging the capabilities of the Aruba infrastructure for more use cases. Secondly, there is a security benefit as well. So without this capability, there would be gateways deployed. And these gateways are typically deployed by the line of business. In many cases, IT don't see them. They don't have visibility. They don't manage them yet they're connected to the network. So what happens is we end up with these shadow networks. When there are shadow networks, we know that there is an opportunity for security breaches. So being able to bring all of that sensor traffic, whether it be BLE, Zigbee, via a USB or Wi-Fi onto the network, we can visualize it. Once we visualize it, we can secure it. Now you may be thinking, okay, well, that's fantastic. But what is Aruba doing to help me manage this sea of sensors. So if we go to the next slide, we have brought about an IT operations dashboard. So the left-hand side is the app store. So this is where you would go as an enterprise to download, deploy, purchase the application that you are interested in. Think of the App Store that you have on your iPhone or the Play Store for Google, okay? Same concept. You select the app. It downloads to your phone. In this instance, we're selecting the application and it's being downloaded on to the network. On the right-hand side is the visibility. So giving visibility into those non-IP things that are connecting to your network, understanding the battery life of those sensors, being able to help with that life cycle management because in many instances, it's not 1 or 2 sensors, it's thousands and tens of thousands that end up being deployed. So the few key capabilities to consider when exploring what is available with Wi-Fi 6E today. Moving on to our next prediction. AI will liberate IT admins. I have to say, this is probably one of my favorites. Being able to use artificial intelligence to augment, not to replace, augment IT; being able to automate processes. One process being the ability to capture the necessary logs in the event of an outage and raise a TAC [ case ] with -- automatically within the platform. So rather than sending an engineer out at 2:00 in the morning, being able to have that peace of mind that the Aruba Central platform along with the Aruba infrastructure understands where the problem is and then captures the necessary logs so that they can be transferred to TAC in order to start troubleshooting. So that's just sort of one of the examples of where we're leveraging some artificial intelligence to augment IT admins. Now how are we doing this? Next slide. We have invested very heavily in building the industry's largest data lake. So we are consuming the telemetry, not the data, just the telemetry from the Aruba infrastructure. So what is the Wi-Fi coverage? What is the power? And what sort of resources are the access points using at the moment? What is the S&R? All of that information is being captured into a data lake. We are collecting that from the wireless network, the switching fabric and also the wide area network. With this information, we can then start doing some peer comparisons. We can then start looking at the organization to understand, well, what does normal look like for your organization versus my organization? What does normal look for your organization during Christmas time versus my organization around tax time. So being able to understand what's normal and then report on any trends, as I've mentioned, any deviations from what's considered normal so that IT can start to be proactive rather than reactive. So if we look at the next slide, this is just some of the capabilities that are realized with AI Ops. So I'll just fill this slide out. Okay. So the ability to provide a way to proactively warn IT if we see anomalies on the network. Okay? So rather than waiting until it becomes service impacting and help desk is phoned, bring those up, bring those to IT's attention so that they can then start taking action and, where possible, provide the root cause and also the remediation. So what do I need to take as the next step? Being able to, as I've mentioned, accurately profile IoT clients and devices that are connecting to the network. And I'll take a look at an example of that in a minute -- and having visibility into the performance of applications from the end users' experience. So we did some research with our customers, and asked them the value that Aruba Central provides to their organizations. And it was very interesting to see some of the results that came back being -- using AIOps capabilities, augmenting IT delivered them a faster mean time to resolution. Having that ability to prevent, to be alerted proactively to issues before they become service impacting resulted in a significant drop of trouble tickets. So just a couple of points of value around the AIOps capabilities that is available within Aruba Central. Now I did touch on -- if we go to the next slide, this concept of client insights. So being able to use machine learning to visualize what's connected to the network. How do we do that? Let's take a scenario. So we have 2 iPads. And to the network, they look exactly the same. They present the same. They had the same operating system. They have the same Wi-Fi connectivity. Yet one iPad is being used to visit management, and one iPad is being used as a meeting room booking. They have very different roles on the network. So being able to visualize the fact that there are these 2 devices, but then going deeper. So what is that device's behavior on the network? Is it static? Does it come on and off the network in regular intervals? Or does it roam continuously? Also, what applications is it using? So if we're looking at the visitor iPad, it's accessing the visitor service. If we're looking at the meeting room iPad, it's accessing the meeting room service. Understanding how these devices are using the network, what applications they're using, we can use that to help us classify those devices. Once we've classified them as a visitor iPad, meeting room iPad, we can assign security policies. So that is compelling. Being able to go beyond assigning security policies to corporate devices, but looking at IoT and things that are connecting to the network. So next slide. In summary, David has touched on 5 key points, okay? The death of the stand-alone firewall. We know that we're using cloud applications. Security needs to follow where we're consuming those applications. So it makes sense to start moving some security functionality to the cloud. Zero Trust principles accelerate the alignment of IT and security networking objectives. Being able to have a common visibility, being able to have the network start to play a much greater role in the security framework by virtue brings these 2 teams together with a common objective. Measuring the end-user experience becomes a must for driving operational excellence. We know that many things are digitized now and that is only going to continue. So we need to be able to have the tools to be able to measure the end user's experience as they're using these digital resources. 6 gigahertz Wi-Fi adoption skyrockets, and Wi-Fi 6 will continue to be the biggest feature for Wi-Fi 7. We've seen the availability of the spectrum. We've spoken about some of the future capabilities and the need for new clients, increased power and careful consideration around how we design wireless networks using Wi-Fi 7. In contrast, Wi-Fi 6E is readily available today. We -- there are multiple enterprise use cases. And if you're thinking about investment protection, that is certainly the direction that I would encourage today in order to start realizing return on investment immediately. And we touched on the way AI will augment the operations team and make them more efficient, allow them to work on higher-value items than the break/fix that can tend to happen. So with that, Alex, I'm hoping that we have time for a couple of questions.

We do. So thank you for that, Elissa. Let's welcome Siok Been to the Q&A section as well. Siok Been, welcome. And we'll go through a couple of questions that we have here. We have some very, very eagle-eyed attendees in the audience who noticed a couple of things on slides. So let's dig into that first. The first one of those is we have noticed a slide that says New Central. Has it been released?

Maybe I can take that? So we are in the process of running beta in APJ. Right now, we have multiple customers that has opt to be in the beta. So we were still in the rollout in the whole APJ region. That said, I think some of the functionality that Elissa has mentioned in the call, the AI functionality are available in our existing Central platform. So do not wait. If you want, you can try that in terms of like getting to know a little bit more about the AI functionality in that way.

If I can add to that, Siok Been, if you're interested in a demo of the New Central, please reach out to us. So we're more than happy to start demonstrating some of the capabilities. But it's also a great opportunity, as Siok Been mentioned, to leverage the AI capabilities that are available today.

Thank you both. The other thing that was noticed is that HPE is actually not in the SSE Magic Quadrant. So Siok Been, do you want to talk a little bit about why that's the case?

Yes. During the -- I mean, in the past, [indiscernible] has a separate Magic Quadrant, SSE as well as SD-WAN, right? So when they were actually evaluating like the combined Magic Quadrants, right, we are in the process of acquiring [ FCs ]. So unfortunately, we did not make the cut. But we do have a very strong portfolio right now with the SSE with the acquiring of the [ FC solution ]. And on part of that, as you know, that we are in 7 years in a magic leader quadrant for the wired and wireless. So be sure that -- be confident that you have a strong portfolio to go with Aruba.

Fantastic, and looking forward to seeing that quadrant next year and seeing how we're placed. Next question is, can the UXI center dashboard integrate with our network monitoring system so we can get notified if an agreed threshold is breached?

So do you want to take that, Siok Been?

Yes, let me go to jump in. Yes, we do have hopes right, to help in the integration. And also one thing we want to bring up the UXI solutions is not only designed for Aruba network environment, right? So if you are not Aruba Network environment, we also get into -- leverage on the UXI to understand user experience. And hopefully, one day, you can upgrade your infrastructures to Aruba Networking Solution so that you will enjoy the greater user experience with that.

Fantastic. Now picking up on the AI liberating IT admins, Elissa, can you talk a little bit about the security side of that? And what can the current AI solutions enable when it comes to security that Aruba has?

So from a security approach, really being focused around the visibility and then in order to profile and classify devices. Once we've classified them, we can then start assigning security policies to those particular devices. Looking at ways to also optimize the network performance as well, being able to pinpoint if there are sort of deviations from what's normal in the network, so really around making IT a lot more proactive than reactive.

Fantastic. Now one of the other big headlines that came in these predictions is the death of the stand-alone firewall. So Elissa, can you -- it is a big headline and it's a good headline. But there's a little bit more to it in terms of how the firewall actually plays in the environment. Do you want to chat a little bit more about the role of the firewall and go to a bit more detail on what David was talking about?

Certainly. So David was being very prescriptive when he was talking about a stand-alone firewall. And that is an appliance that is dedicated to just a firewalling function. If we think about the branch environment in particular, what we have seen in branches, WAN optimization, routers, firewalling, IDS, IPS. We're really focused on consolidating all of those capabilities into a single appliance. It doesn't mean that the firewalling function itself is going away. What David is referring is that the appliance itself in branch instances, it can be consolidated with other functions. In large campus environments, depending on where the applications are sitting, there may be opportunities to reduce investments in those firewalls, especially if you're delivering a secure connection directly from the end user to the application that they're accessing. It bypasses the network that forms a secure tunnel end-to-end. So again, it's just probably not the death of firewall function, but the appliance itself.

I would like to add on to that, yes. On top of that, like, we can see that today we are working everywhere and anywhere, right? So it can be from home or remote areas. So what David has also mentioned about in the session is the fact that every touch point where we connect to the network, right, itself has to be the passport checkpoint, right? So where is enforcement going to be at. So that's why we call it a security that built it into the networking infrastructure. And today, we support that.

Fantastic. And we will go with the final question for the day. I am currently an Aruba customer. How do I adopt AIOps? Is there any hardware replacement required?

So I can -- Elissa, how about you take that?

Go ahead, Siok Been.

Right. So okay. Yes. So if you are existing Aruba customer, all you need to do is just firstly get onto the Aruba cloud platform, which is Central. All the capability is built in on this central platform, right? So it were [ FC ] infrastructure, be it AP or switch [indiscernible] we start running on enjoy the features that you have on this network infrastructure. Elissa, you want to jump in more?

Yes. So what Siok Been mentioned is absolutely correct. By virtue of being an Aruba customer, moving to Aruba Central to give you that end-to-end visibility and control in [ X ] AI capabilities. So we're collecting telemetry from your devices, looking at how they're performing, identifying any trends. And all of that comes with Aruba Central.

Fantastic. So I think we will leave it there for today. Thank you everyone for joining and spending the time with us. We appreciate that you do take time out of your day to spend it with us and hear all about these predictions of what's to come. We trust that you found it insightful and useful. If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate. Reach out to your Aruba account manager or hit arubanetworks.com to get all your questions answered. And we will follow this up with a recording. So if you want to play any of this back, you'll have a link for that soon enough. And before you do drop off, if you could spend a few moments -- sorry -- to fill out the post webinar questionnaire, it would be much appreciated. Other than that, thank you very much. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you again very soon.

Thanks, everyone. Bye.

Bye.