Last week we spent four days in Barcelona at the annual HPE Discover event. Coming together with teams from across the industry and hearing from the leaders across the organisation on the future of HPE.

It has only been a few months since HPE’s acquisition of Juniper, yet they are “already delivering tangible integrations between Juniper Mist and Aruba Central on the journey to self-driving networks,” a continuous thread shared at this year’s HPE Discover in Barcelona.

Throughout the week, there were many examples shared of how HPE plan to align the best of both worlds together. One of the most significant developments is the upcoming “dual-personality” access point, that can operate on either Mist or Central. This single hardware platform gives customers the option to choose which software image and therefore which management ecosystem they prefer, an early example of how both platforms will work seamlessly together.

HPE also continues to work on ways to cross-fertilise features between both platforms and as both were built using modern microservices architectures, capabilities that can move between them with minimal friction. Mist AI and automated actions are incorporated in Aruba Central while Central’s client fingerprinting, known as ‘Client Insights’ is being transferred to Mist. This can also be found with Central’s Agentic AI framework, known for breaking down complex queries into small, specialised “agents” that work on sub-tasks independently before recombining their results, as its integrated into Mist.

HPE also announced Central On-Prem 3.0, which delivers modern AI capabilities to customers that require data sovereignty, or prefer not to use cloud services. In the past, some AI features were limited in the on-premises version because the machine-learning computation occurred in the cloud.  With the new model, the machine learning still operates in the cloud however, the resulting AI models can be deployed and run entirely on-prem. This gives customers the advantages of cloud-native intelligence, such as AIOps, client insights, and advanced analytics, while allowing them to retain full control over their organisation’s data and infrastructure.

The HPE Discover event emphasised that both platforms will continue to exist and no customers will be left behind as both platforms’ best capabilities will continue to work together. Mist AI customers will benefit from Aruba Central’s advanced features while Central customers will benefit from the power of Mist’s AI automation and intelligence. These rapid integrations are already demonstrating the value of the two networking businesses under HPE’s acquisition, especially as they move toward their bigger innovation: a self-driving network.

The self-driving network is a cloud-managed solution that can automatically detect issues, such as a stuck port, and take corrective action when authorised by the customer, a huge step towards the future of technology.

The company continues to make rapid progress as they integrate features between Juniper Mist and HPE Aruba. As the technology cross-pollination continues to reach our customers, we are excited to see how the combined organisation will continue to deliver innovations powered by collaboration.