LAS VEGAS — Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) rolled out updates to Aruba Central, its cloud-based platform that unifies network management, artificial intelligence (AI) powered analytics, and security across wired, wireless, and WAN at the edge.

Aruba, which HPE acquired in 2015, plays a starring role in HPE’s edge strategy — and HPE CEO Antonio Neri’s pledge to invest $4 billion in edge products and services by 2022.

SDxCentral sat down this week at HPE Discover with Sujatha Mandava, a director at Aruba, to discuss the Aruba Central updates, and why companies should start thinking more broadly than SD-WAN and instead talk about software-defined branch (SD-Branch).

SD-WAN capabilities can address networking and security between the branch and clouds or the branch and the data center, but it doesn’t necessarily address IoT devices and users that are connecting at the edge. So the concept of SD-Branch includes SD-WAN but also extends to the LAN and the WLAN, Mandava explained.

“Thinking about the branch as a whole was very much Aruba’s vision,” she said. “You’re not just optimizing the WAN, you’re optimizing everything in your branch.”

And Aruba Central is the central management console for everything in the branch. The cloud-based product also pulls intelligence from the 500,000 infrastructure devices it manages across the portfolio, and it added additional new AI and analysis capabilities, which HPE announced this week.

Aruba acquired networking analytics startup Rasa Networks in 2016, and used that company’s technology as the basis for its NetInsights analytics. Last year it acquired Cape Networks to extend its AI-powered networking capabilities with Cape’s sensor-based service assurance — these combined capabilities are now called User Experience Insight.

At the Discover event, Aruba announced that the two acquisitions are completely integrated with Aruba Central. This will allow IT teams to resolve network and infrastructure problems more quickly, and also proactively identify ways to optimize networks and infrastructure.

“With the AI-powered analytics and the user-centric services assurance we are able to provide that end-to-end network visibility for IT professionals,” Mandava said.

Additionally, the platform has a new SD-WAN Orchestrator, which allows IT teams to deploy overlay topologies in a large-scale edge infrastructure, connecting thousands of branch locations with multiple data centers. This tool can be combined with Aruba Virtual Gateways to extend networking and security policies to workloads running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure. Additionally, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) prioritization feature provides visibility about the end-user experience for SaaS applications like Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.

In April, Aruba announced that it integrated ClearPass Device Insight with Aruba Central to helps enterprises keep track of all the IoT and connected devices running on their network. It automates device discovery and uses machine-learning based fingerprinting and identification.

“Everyday is a new day in terms of where these IoT devices are coming from and what they are connecting to,” Mandava said. “ClearPass plays a big role in terms of that device visibility and security.”

And, as HPE transitions to an as-a-service business, all of these Aruba products are available via HPE GreenLake as networking subscription-based services.

Centralized security and policy management along with automation will become increasingly important as the number of edge and IoT devices increases and networks become increasingly disaggregated, Mandava said.

“SD-Branch is going to become very critical as edge builds out,” she added. “The other thing people talk about: ‘I’m very happy with the policies I set up in my campus and I want to extend those same policies to the edge, to the branches, and have that same level of security that I provide to internal and external things.’ And when I talk about 14,000 locations, for example, there is no way I am optimizing it all manually, so automation and centralization becomes increasingly important.”