Is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) gunning for Cisco? The company's $925 million acquisition of Silver Peak, announced earlier this week, would suggest the answer to that question is yes.

During the company's webcast on the news Monday, executives from HPE, Aruba Networks, and Silver Peak discussed how the acquisition would open the door to new markets beyond LAN switching and wireless. Keerti Melkote, Aruba’s founder and president of HPE’s Intelligent Edge division, said when combined, the technologies represent an addressable market valued at $32.7 billion.

But while the acquisition will no doubt open new doors for HPE, it also stands to raise Aruba's profile in the competitive SD-WAN market, and position the vendor to directly challenge Cisco, said Shin Umeda, VP at Dell'Oro Group, in an interview with SDxCentral.

"There is a technology hole that they have with SD-WAN. ... At the same time, when I look at where Aruba competes with their wireless LAN and switching, it's against Cisco," Umeda said, adding that the only place where Aruba couldn't compete with Cisco was branch routing, something that this week's acquisition directly addresses.

News of the acquisition came as no surprise to Umeda who has long predicted the crowded SD-WAN market would begin to consolidate.

"I had expected some consolidation or someone to buy one of the big players," he said, adding HPE's decision to purchase Silver Peak was "probably a good choice" considering the vendor's well established route to market.

Umeda added that while Aruba may be late to the SD-WAN game, the company is now in a position to address enterprise networking demands from switching and wireless LAN, to the WAN. "There aren't many companies that have that capability," he said.

Whether HPE will position Aruba as a more direct competitor to Cisco's Meraki platform, to which Aruba Central already bears some similarities, or the company will go after Cisco's enterprise-focused Viptela offering remains to be seen.

According to Umeda, it will really depend on whether HPE wants to compete in the high-end or mid-range market, and may be several months before the integration begins to take shape.

"I would expect some choppiness over the next 12 months," he said. "None of these things go perfectly."

According to Umeda, regardless of which route HPE takes with Aruba moving forward, there remains one piece still unaccounted for: security.

"One of the things that popped into my head right away was what is the network security play for the combined company," he said. "Security is becoming more and more important in SD-WAN."

While Silver Peak has baked in some security features into its SD-WAN, the company has traditionally partnered for advanced security functionality. Because of this, Umeda wouldn't be surprised to see HPE acquire a security vendor in the coming months, especially as SD-WAN and managed security providers move toward a secure access service edge (SASE) model.

"Everyone in this space, because of the Gartner SASE model, is really thinking about how security blends and combines with SD-WAN, whether it's complimentary, overlapping, or a subset of the entire SASE model," he said.