Aruba today announced its entry into the edge market with a new cloud-native platform that aims to automatically predict and fix issues at the network edge. Aruba Edge Services Platform (ESP) is comprised of 35 services, including a dozen new insights that were consolidated under Aruba Central, the company’s dashboard for network management.

The unified infrastructure targets campuses, data centers, branches, and remote workers, but it only supports Aruba’s access points, switches, and SD-WAN gateways. Aruba ESP can be fired up as a service in the cloud, on-premises, as a managed service through one of Aruba’s partners, or as a network-as-a-service offering through Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) GreenLake. 

HPE acquired Aruba in 2015, and HPE CEO Antonio Neri in 2018 pledged to invest $4 billion in edge products and services by 2022. 

“We’ve automated the cloud to a great degree, but the clouds are big centralized data centers that bring together compute, storage, networking, and create an infrastructure for applications to be built on top of. The edge is the exact opposite — it is highly distributed, it is all the places that you’re familiar with,” Keerti Melkote, president and founder at Aruba, said today during a keynote at the company’s digital conference.

“Now, the problem becomes how do you take technology, the same infrastructure technologies — compute, storage, networking — bring it together, to harness the power of data at the edge. And that is really the big challenge and that is the reason why it’s an unsolved problem at this point in time,” he said.

“The future architectures are going to be edge connected to the cloud and what happens at the edge stays at the edge,” Melkote said, adding that the most significant changes revolve around the need to analyze and act upon data. 

Aruba ESP is a “piece of software that’s cloud native, allowing you to highly automate the deployment of your intelligent edges, and then get insights from the data that you’re collecting at the intelligent edge and put that back into action,” he explained. 

“The common denominator for all of this and converting this data, transporting it from generation to analysis, and then back out to operationalize, is the network,” Patrick LaPorte, senior director of cloud and software marketing at Aruba, told SDxCentral. “If all these challenges exist with the network, there’s no way that the network is going to be reliable enough, secure enough, and perform well enough to achieve these goals.”

In addition to services that Aruba already had commercially available, Aruba ESP introduces what the vendor claims to be the industry’s only controllerless, cloud-based platform to provide full-stack management and operations for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN infrastructure. 

Other enhancements include a more multi-dimensional view of network performance in Aruba Central, artificial intelligence informed by modeling data from more than a million network devices that generate more than 1.5 billion data points per day; a natural language processing discovery service; deeper visibility into user-centric analytics; and a new developer hub to facilitate the development of third-party applications for Aruba ESP.

Aruba Central, which houses Aruba ESP, currently manages networks for more than 65,000 customers, according to the company.