It’s been a little over a decade since Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)’s Aruba Networking Central was unleashed onto the world. In the 11 years since, the platform has seen a slew of additions spanning security and SD-WAN capabilities.

But ahead of its next major makeover in what the vendor is labelling as "New Central," the platform got a minor update in the form of a new U.K.-specific instance.

While it added the ability to deploy the platform in a VPC environment and on-premises environments back in April, this British iteration of Aruba Networking Central is the latest in an ever-growing number of sovereignty-focused offerings to hit the market.

Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, and Oracle are among the big-name brands to have leaped to meet the growing demand from enterprise customers for localized control and security of their data.

HPE’s latest launch, however, focuses solely on the control of user telemetry data – everything from metrics on traffic to router or switch status.

Simon Wilson, CTO at HPE Aruba in EMEA, told SDxCentral that while organizations have historically been comfortable with running cloud-based applications, they’re oftentimes reluctant to move their network management to the cloud.

“We've seen customers warm to having their network management platforms in the cloud more in recent years,” Wilson said. “We're certainly seeing a big increase in interest in doing that, alongside this concern around where the data is stored.”

That’s where HPE wants its British-focused Aruba Networking Central to come in.

The instance user telemetry data is stored entirely within the confines of the country, providing British network operators of both wired and wireless networks with greater security.

According to stereotypes, Brits, by nature, are apparently reserved and cautious, with the infamous concept of the “stiff upper lip” cementing stoicism as a national trait.

But in Wilson’s view, the reluctance on the operator’s part boils down to trust. Network telemetry data keeps entire enterprise technology stacks in float and in check. British stoicism aside, there’s a fundamental business case for wanting to keep information configuration changes, logs, and even system error notifications out of the cloud.

“HPE’s got a great reputation and record, a trusted vendor over many years. But customers still have this concern – Where is my data stored? Who's got access to it?” Wilson said. “The fact that you can say it’s on the U.K. cluster now gives them an additional level of comfort.”

Timing and trust

The U.K. cluster launch comes shortly after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that disrupted services across the globe. Mere days after that outage, Microsoft Azure went down, and shortly after that instance, not even quantum cloud services were safe as IBM’s Qiskit Runtime joined the downtime club.

While HPE Aruba's platform wasn't affected by those instances – an important note considering the platform itself is mostly based in AWS – the outage incidents have amplified existing concerns about cloud concentration and data sovereignty.

Wilson told SDxCentral that the AWS outage prompted pointed questions from some customers.

“You never want to take benefit for somebody else's misfortune. But the recent issues with AWS certainly had people thinking about where their platforms are actually hosted," Wilson said. "I fielded a few questions in the last couple of weeks from customers saying, ‘we didn't notice anything happen to your platform, but just curious as to where it's hosted.'”

Beyond the AI hype

Following the British instance launch, HPE will roll out the New Central updates in December, in what the vendor hopes will be a major redesign heavy on AI capabilities.

But while rivals have jumped on the AI bandwagon in addition to the sovereignty one, Wilson was quick to distinguish between genuine machine learning and not rebranded automation.

“Some of the things that we were doing back at the very beginning, we would call them automation,” Wilson said. “We now see other vendors calling them AI.”

It’s a pointed observation in an industry where the AI label has often been bandied around.

A Gartner report from June, for example, coined the term “agent washing,” the effective rebranding of existing services that leverage things like robotic process automation (RPA), only to slap the term agentic on it to meet the latest marketing trends.

Wilson acknowledged the tension between marketing trends and technical accuracy, but insisted that the upcoming platform refresh will feature what he called “proper AI” – actual machine learning and agentic technologies that’ll provide operators with answers to their questions and actually direct them to where the information was found in the platform.

“The AI capabilities have grown over time,” Wilson said. “Central’s next iteration is very heavy on AI insights, and particularly agentic AI. You ask it a question, it takes you to the answer, but it also takes you where it found the answer as well.”

The distinction matters as HPE continues to integrate its recent Juniper Networks acquisition, particularly the Mist platform, into what the company is positioning as “self-driving networks.” These can spot unusual behavior, alert administrators, and eventually take automated action.

“This is something that has to evolve over time. We could let the AI loose to do things automatically today, but you need to establish trust,” Wilson said. “Giving [network operators] the insights, an easy button to implement the recommendation we’re suggesting that they do, and then letting things do it completely automatically. It’s that kind of iterative model as we move towards as we move towards self-driving networks, because the goal of this is about saving time and making sure things are policy-driven.”