- HPE said Aruba Central and Mist will remain separate platforms, with Mist for cloud and Aruba Central for on-premises use
- The platforms already share the Marvis AI engine and new access points, and HPE gave no date for full convergence
- HPE trails Cisco, the campus networking big dog
HPE will never merge its Aruba Central and Juniper Mist network management platforms into one, but is converging the AI, applications and hardware underneath, so customers get the same experience whichever platform they run, said Rami Rahim, EVP, president and GM of networking at HPE.
"They never converge into one platform. They don't need to," Rahim said during a question-and-answer session with analysts at HPE's Networking Investor Day.
The decision drives how HPE competes for enterprise campus and branch networks, its largest networking category at about half of networking revenue. HPE is the No. 2 enterprise wireless LAN vendor, far behind Cisco, which has taken a different route to combining its own two campus product lines.
What are Aruba and Mist?
Aruba Networks, founded in 2002, built enterprise Wi-Fi and campus switching. HP acquired it in 2015. Its management platform, Aruba Central, runs in the cloud, on premises or in a virtual private cloud.
Mist Systems, co-founded in 2014 by Sujai Hajela, now EVP and GM of HPE's campus and branch business, built a cloud-only Wi-Fi platform around its Marvis AI engine. Marvis measures user experience and diagnoses network problems. Juniper Networks bought Mist in 2019, and HPE acquired Juniper for $14 billion in July 2025, bringing both product lines under one roof.
How will Aruba Central and Mist coexist?
Each platform keeps the deployment model it does best. Mist is "exceptional at cloud-based deployments," and Aruba Central can be deployed "on-prem or virtual private cloud," Rahim said in an interview with Fierce at the investor day.
New customers get a simple rule from Rahim. "If it's a cloud-based deployment model, start with Mist. If it's anything else, start with Aruba Central," he said.
Existing customers stay where they are. Very few customers run both platforms, Rahim said, so HPE's priority is assuring each installed base that its platform will keep getting new features.
What are the platforms sharing?
HPE is cross-pollinating in both directions. Marvis is becoming the common AI engine for both platforms. Several AI models moved from Mist to Aruba Central, and agentic mesh — a set of cooperating AI agents that diagnose and fix network problems — came from Aruba to Mist, Hajela told Fierce.
The hardware is converging too. HPE's new access points and switches are built as a single HPE model that connects to either platform, Hajela said.
HPE released its first dual-platform Wi-Fi 7 access point, the AP-723H, in May and has connected its CX switches, originally an Aruba line, to Mist.
Hajela summed up the software approach in a phrase: "build the capability once, deploy it twice." He compared it to an app that runs the same on iPhone and Android.
The sales operations converged earlier. HPE combined its Aruba and Juniper sales teams about six months after the deal closed. On Nov. 1, it will merge the two companies' partner programs, letting all 60,000 HPE partners sell the full networking portfolio. Only about 10% of Aruba and Juniper partners overlapped before the acquisition, Rahim said.
Rahim said the platforms will become "equally capable" over time because they will share software and hardware building blocks, and he told customers to watch for more unified access points and switches.
How does HPE's approach compare with Cisco's?
Cisco, the big dog in campus networking, has faced the same problem after it bought cloud-managed Meraki in the distant, nearly prehistoric past (2012) and kept it alongside its Catalyst line for many years. In November 2024, Cisco unified its Wi-Fi hardware and licensing, selling Wi-Fi 7 access points that run under either cloud or on-premises management on a single license. Cisco has since launched Cloud Control, a management layer spanning Meraki, Catalyst Center and other Cisco products.
HPE executives argue they are moving faster. Rahim said some peers "have been talking about unifying products for close to a decade," while HPE shipped dual-platform access points in less than a year.
The market numbers do not yet show HPE pulling ahead. In the second quarter of 2026, enterprise WLAN revenue grew 23.2% year over year, according to IDC. Cisco grew 27.2% and held 39% of the market. Combined HPE and Juniper revenue grew 7.5%, for a 17.2% share. Ubiquiti and Huawei grew faster still.
But Gartner placed HPE highest in the leaders quadrant of its 2026 Magic Quadrant for enterprise wired and wireless LAN infrastructure, ahead of Cisco, Huawei and Arista.
And smaller rivals are taking advantage of the transition period. For example, Extreme Networks is leveraging "the temporary confusion in the market" as Cisco rationalizes Meraki and Catalyst and HPE absorbs Juniper, said Roy Chua, founder and principal at AvidThink, in a May interview prior to Extreme's customer and partner conference. Extreme's Platform One provides unified management across wired and wireless products.
And competitors can gain access to Mist's technology. To clear the Juniper deal, HPE agreed with the Justice Department to auction a perpetual, nonexclusive license to Juniper's Mist AIOps source code and to divest its Instant On small-business wireless line.
Does HPE's plan fit what enterprises and telcos need?
For enterprises, the two-platform model offers investment protection and a choice of deployment model. That choice is becoming more important as operational sovereignty requirements grow. Aruba Central's on-premises option, plus country-specific clouds and in-country support staff, lets HPE serve public-sector buyers that require data and operations to stay in-country, Hajela said.
Telcos are looking to agentic AI operations to cut the cost of running their networks, Rahim said, which plays to the self-driving capabilities HPE is extending to both platforms. A provider building a managed service will still have to pick a platform, or support both. The unified partner program, which takes effect Nov. 1, is HPE's main tool for simplifying that choice.
Learn more about the enterprise networking market on Fierce Network
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