Hewlett Packard to Buy Silver Peak for $925 Million

The new trading week started off with a big acquisition announcement from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

The company said on Monday that it would be acquiring Silver Peak, a software-defined wide area network company, in a transaction valued at $925 million.

California-based Silver Peak has more than 1,500 production SD-WAN customers worldwide.

The specialized WAN provider will be joining with HPE’s Aruba wireless networking subsidiary and will extend Aruba’s portfolio in the SD-WAN space.

“HPE was an early mover in identifying the opportunity at the edge and that trend is accelerating in a post-covid world,” commented Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE.

“Silver Peak’s technology transforms legacy WAN architectures to self-driving WANs, which is a perfect fit with Aruba’s cloud-native artificial-intelligence-driven Edge Services Platform,” he added.

The company said that Silver Peak complements Aruba’s existing work-from-home and branch-office solutions and that the Aruba portfolio is designed to securely connect any edge to any cloud.

According to HPE, Silver Peak’s “WAN delivers significant cost savings while maintaining application performance for rapid business recovery in a post covid-19 world.”

The transaction is expected to close in HPE’s fiscal 2020 fourth quarter and to be neutral to adjusted earnings per share by fiscal 2022.

“Today’s announcement comes at a unique moment for our customers, who are grappling with business recovery in the wake of the pandemic,” said Keerti Melkote, president of Intelligent Edge for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and founder of Aruba Networks.

“The need for edge-to-cloud architectures has never been more relevant as enterprises look to extend connectivity to branch locations and enable secure work-from-home experiences. Silver Peak’s technology transforms legacy WAN architectures to self-driving WANs, which is a perfect fit with Aruba’s cloud-native, AI-driven Edge Services Platform. Together, we will be able to meet these needs with critical connectivity, security, and AI capabilities to drive the next generation of Edge-to-Cloud transformation.”

“Bringing together Silver Peak’s advanced SD-WAN solutions with Aruba’s industry leading networking portfolio provides an unprecedented opportunity to deliver a comprehensive business-driven solutions to our customers,” said David Hughes, founder and CEO of Silver Peak.

“The Silver Peak and Aruba teams share a common vision and goal to provide simplicity, scalability, and application-awareness at the edge. With Aruba’s extensive go-to-market, we will further accelerate our ability to drive faster adoption of these transformational technologies. We are excited for the opportunities we will have as a combined team to accelerate innovation in this fast-growing segment of the networking market.”

According to market researcher 650 Group, the market for SD-WAN will more than double to $4.9 billion in 2024 from $2.3 billion in 2020.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HPE) and have not been compensated for this article.