HPE brings networking into focus for enterprises at Discover 2026, rolling out switching advancements, AI-powered remediation and AI assistant support.
LAS VEGAS -- HPE wants its networking customers to get comfortable in the passenger seat.
HPE introduced a variety of "self-driving" network capabilities at its Discover user conference Tuesday, continuing to make networking and AI a focus as it takes on fellow IT infrastructure giants such as Cisco, Dell and Huawei. The latest updates further HPE's integration of technologies from prior acquisitions, such as Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks, into its overall product set.
"The foundation of what we call this agentic enterprise starts with a self-driving network, because agentic AI needs secure adaptive connectivity across users, data, applications, clouds and, of course, data centers," said Rami Rahim, executive vice president, president and general manager of networking at HPE, in a press briefing last week in advance of Discover.
New capabilities include support for HPE Networking CX wired access switches in the HPE Mist AIOps platform, self-healing automation in HPE Aruba Networking Central and new AIOps features that use agentic reasoning to shorten root cause analysis and remediation.
Networking competitors to HPE have gone the route of platform consolidation, said Jim Frey, principal analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
"Not everybody is done with the transition, not all of it is shipping in general availability. But everyone's moving towards consolidated and simplified, getting rid of all the different products and coming up with a single AI-infused, agentic-powered management platform," Frey told TechTarget.
With so much agentic AI noise in the market, one analyst suggested enterprise executives look for uses where an agent has good data and one specific job to do.
Those go straight at a headache execs already have, which is that AI systems are getting too complex and pricey to babysit by hand.
Mike Leone, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy
Mike Leone, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, pointed to HPE's agent that helps diagnose why a network problem happened and the monitoring tools in HPE's OpsRamp software that track how much AI costs and how well it's performing.
"Those go straight at a headache execs already have, which is that AI systems are getting too complex and pricey to babysit by hand," Leone wrote in an email to TechTarget. "And they work off data the systems already collect."
"A year ago, we promised our customers that we would bring together the best of Juniper and Aruba," Rahim said. "Today we are delivering on that promise."
On an earnings call earlier this month, HPE CEO and President Antonio Neri said he is pleased with the progress on the Juniper integration.
"The self-driving network is no longer a concept," Neri said. "It is a reality."
HPE Juniper QFX Switches are now available in the HPE AI Factory, managed through the Data Center Director. The integration of the networking portfolio into HPE AI Factory means the AI-native infrastructure has proactive operations to speed up AI data center deployments, according to HPE.
The QFX5140 Switch, designed for inference clusters and edge AI uses, adds to an infrastructure platform that spans compute, networking, storage, software and services. The switching advancements enable GPUs to spend more time processing workloads and less time waiting on the network, according to HPE.
In addition, HPE has integrated its Networking CX switching portfolio with Mist, Juniper's AI-native networking platform. Capabilities include AI-native visibility, zero-touch provisioning, service-level insights and AI-driven actions.
HPE went from a small networking player to a major one with the Juniper acquisition, according to Frey. With a "massive integration" like this one, he said, it's important to both be mindful of how to support existing customers and put together a roadmap that includes consolidation.
"They're moving steadily, but cautiously towards how they bring these two product lines together," Frey said.
Aruba takes the wheel too
While Juniper Mist is a cloud-only deployment model, Aruba Central has a virtual private cloud and an on-premises platform, Neri told Light Reading earlier this year.
Aruba Central now includes self-driving capabilities such as wired port remediation, powered by the HPE Marvis AI engine, extending autonomous operations further across the networking suite, according to the vendor.
HPE is also bringing Aruba CX switching capabilities into Mist, which include zero-trust provisioning, simplified onboarding for CX switches, AI-driven visibility before and after connection, proactive issue detection and remediation, and Marvis AI assistant support for troubleshooting and operations, according to Rahim.
"We're making it very clear to our customers with these innovations that our platform integration strategy is not a distraction for us away from innovation," Rahim said. "It's in fact, an acceleration of innovation for our customers."
Paul Crocetti is editorial director of Informa TechTarget's Infrastructure sites, which include SearchStorage, SearchDataCenter and SearchITOperations. Since starting at then-TechTarget in 2015, he has also served as editor on the SearchStorage, SearchDataBackup and SearchDisasterRecovery sites. You can reach him at [email protected] and on LinkedIn.
