HPE has put the finishing touches on its $925 million deal to buy SD-WAN vendor Silver Peak, which narrowed the gap on rivals such as Cisco and VMware.
As one of the leading SD-WAN vendors, Silver Peak was long rumored to be an acquisition target before HPE pulled the trigger in July. Silver Peak will be mixed into HPE's Aruba business unit, which makes wireless local area networking (WLAN) gear for a “comprehensive edge to cloud networking solution covering all aspects of wired, wireless local area networking and wide area networking," according to Monday's press release.
RELATED: HPE snags SD-WAN vendor Silver Peak for $925 million
In GigaOm's recent "Radar report for SD-WAN," GigaOm analyst Chris Grundemann ranked Silver Peak, along with Cisco, Fortinet, VMware, and CloudGenix, as one of the leading SD-WAN vendors.
In an interview prior to HPE closing its Silver Peak deal, Grundemann said the acquisition of Silver Peak rounded out what Aruba has been doing in the WAN. Having the backing of HPE and Aruba will also enable Silver Peak to garner more accounts, Grundemann said.
"Silver Peak, I would put them up against Cisco or VMware any day of the week," Grundemann said. "I think they do have a really solid SD-WAN product, and so I think it would be good for both."
Now that the deal has closed, Silver Peak founder and CEO David Hughes will join HPE as the senior vice president of the WAN business within Aruba.
“WAN transformation is a key component of HPE’s Intelligent Edge and edge-to-cloud vision and growth strategy,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, in a statement. “Armed with a comprehensive SD-WAN portfolio with the addition of Silver Peak, we will accelerate the delivery of a true distributed cloud model and cloud experience for all apps and data wherever they live.”