September 18, 2024 • 14 mins
Discover the future of networking with "Tomorrow’s Network: Unravelling Complexity and Security." Join host Barry White from SoftSource vBridge for an insightful discussion with Steve Isles and Andrew Fox from HPE Aruba Networking, and CTO David Small.
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Episode Transcript
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S1 (00:05):
Welcome to another episode of Lifting the Lid on Technology,
your go to insights for the latest tech and innovation.
I'm Barry Weiss, your host and CIO at Soft Source Feedback.
Join us for a special two part discussion where we'll
talk about robust, scalable, and cost effective strategies that will
protect your network into the future. Today, I'm speaking to
(00:27):
Steve Illes and Andrew Fox from HPE Aruba Networking, along
with their own CTO, David Small. Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for
joining me today. Good to see you all. Thanks, Barry.
Good to be here. Yeah. Thanks, Barry. Thank you. I
thought we'd kick things off, and perhaps we could start
(00:48):
with you, Andrew. And your role. You travel up and
down the country as country manager for Australia and New
Zealand for HPE Aruba. You meet a lot of companies.
You need different industries, different sized organizations. What are customers
talking to you about, particularly when it comes to networking?
I look after an amazing team of professionals that work
with our customers across Australia and New Zealand, helping them
(01:12):
to do cool things with their networks. Right. Um, it's
it's a fun place to be. You know, no, no
matter where you are as a, as a customer and
and your journey, that network is absolutely essential to whatever
you're trying to do, whether you're just trying to get
the job done. You need a network. If you're trying
to do I, you need a bigger network, you know? So, um,
(01:34):
there's a conversation with every single customer. Um, and usually
that conversation is, is a revolving around how they can,
how they can do a few key things, how they
can make better use of the investment they make in
their network. Uh, second thing is, you know, how do
they keep themselves off the front page and, you know,
and reduce risk? And, and the third thing is, you know,
(01:57):
with this valuable commodity that is time and money. Um,
how can they do more with less? You know, which
is a really exciting set of conversation to be having.
What are the common bits of feedback I get from
customers around complexity? You know, everybody's finding that their networks
seem to becoming more complex is that you get that
(02:18):
feedback as well from a lot of customers.
S2 (02:20):
We do. And it's really because.
S1 (02:22):
You know, a lot of the time they've built them,
you know, over many years sort of organically, you know,
started with some switching, added some wireless back when when
wireless wasn't really mission critical. Um, now it is absolutely
mission critical. And maybe the thing they've built is not
really up to.
S3 (02:40):
Up to scratch.
S1 (02:41):
Anymore. Um, sort of 5 or 6 years ago, HBO
started talking about, you know, security in the broader sense
of the word. Um, to a lot of our customers now,
they're they're sort of scratching their heads and thinking, how
do we how do we reduce the risk and how
do we up our security game? And of course, the
network plays a really important part in that. So but
(03:04):
it doesn't have to be complex, right? I guess that's
the conversation we're trying to have. There is, you know,
lots of things you can do to try and create
something that is, you know, cohesive, something that that integrates
nicely together, works well with all all the vendors or
all the integrations you need to inside your organization. Reduces risk,
(03:24):
saves you a bit of money. Um, and, you know,
some of the things we're doing with with soft source,
for example, are, are absolutely key to that. How about you, Stephen?
I mean, a similar sort of question, I guess, is
you are I mean, you're you're the you're the SAS
practice leader for South Pacific and for HPE Aruba. What
sort of conversations are you having and what are some
(03:46):
of the challenges, I guess, that customers are sharing with
you as far as their network teams are concerned and
managing their environments? Good question. I mean, I I'm having
a lot of discussions across.
S4 (03:59):
A lot of different verticals across the region and overwhelmingly things.
The landscape is changing, particularly from a vendor, uh, and
a and our reseller partners standpoint, as far as the
scorecard we're having, I'm having far more discussions about scorecards
and how internal teams managing and delivering outcomes on our
(04:22):
networking gear and other in other places. Um, the end
user experience so far, less are we talking about. You know,
the proof is not in the pudding, the proof is
in the eating. And so, as Andrew was saying a
second ago, uh, taking something that was historically, historically complex
(04:43):
and creating really intelligent, you know, software or technology that
can take something that was historically complex and make it
appear incredibly simple. That's what we seem to be doing
really well. Right. Uh, and that that's manifest manifesting things like,
you know, and that's not just a security statement, I guess,
but it's manifest across a bunch of domains being, you know,
(05:08):
we talked about management and our central platform and, um,
you know, our clearpath's technology that takes that perimeter control
and security, something historically very complex and difficult and makes
it seem really easy. And we extend that into, you know,
the sassy tech, too, and the and the acquisitions that
we've made. The reason HPE Aruba Networking acquired, uh, Silver
(05:31):
Peak as the number one security win vendor in the world. Uh,
and access security as a as a startup leading edge
startup is because of the intelligent nature of the technology
to take something incredibly, incredibly complex and make it seem
very simple. And so what I'm having to demonstrate to
customers across the region universally is, once this goes in,
(05:57):
what additional capability does it give us? And what's going
to be our scorecard with our users. How are they
going to look at us? No longer are we, you know,
at the mercy. Mercy of the tyranny of technology. Putting
tech in. But it's secure. But it's really complicated for users.
But it is what it is because that's the nature
of security. We are no longer scored like that when
(06:20):
it goes in. Is it going to make our customers
and users lives better and is it going to be transparent?
So that's overwhelmingly the type of discussions I'm having. Um,
particularly with security, uh, but far broader as well. If
you use.
S1 (06:35):
The term scorecard there a few times. I mean, how
do you how do you how do customers measure that?
How do they measure that performance? And how does some
of those technologies that you've introduced, such as Clearpass and
Silverpeak and so forth, how do they help customers on
that journey?
S4 (06:50):
I'm sure folks will have a have a perspective there.
I'll go first. Um, from my perspective, it's how transparent
it is. It's how invisible it is. So, you know,
if I talk specifically in the in the security realm
for the second, uh, historically, the expectation generally would be
as you make things more secure, it becomes more difficult
(07:10):
for users and things, be it VPN technology, multi-factor authentication,
all of these other things people need to deal with. Uh,
now it's we're being scored against how transparent and invisible
it is. Can we deploy something and can it actually
remove steps from our users and still deliver the same
or better experience? So it's it's how much technology people
(07:33):
don't see after we've put it in is kind of
the lens we're being viewed through. Outfoxing would you have
anything to add to that?
S1 (07:42):
You know, when we first started on the network security journey,
goodness me, probably 15 years ago, uh, when we first
acquired a company called a mega pod, which then became
became ClearPath, that going right back in time. But, um,
you know, network security was was difficult. Um, networks were
built in a very sort of standard way. Uh, and
(08:06):
the security was kind of an add on that you
stuck on top. I guess what's become really exciting over
the last few years is, you know, the network is
the perfect place. You know, it's a first line of
defense to your organization. If people can't get connected, you know,
it's much harder for them to to do anything nasty.
There's now security in every single level of the network. And,
(08:27):
and and as those pieces all come together, it's just
all about keeping customers safe. And it should be invisible
and it should be centrally controlled. It should be managed
by some sort of sensible policy that determines how your
network behaves and how security works. And if your users
know it's there, then maybe we've done something wrong and
(08:47):
we need to look at how it's put together. And
that's why, you know, that's why you need clever people
like Salesforce to bridge to to help get that policy right. Well, look,
it's a good opportunity for, um, Dave, you know.
S5 (08:57):
We start to.
S1 (08:58):
Talk about this, this move towards more policy driven management
of these environments. What are some of the key things
that organizations need to be thinking about there? And I guess,
you know, if you're at the bottom of the mountain
on this, where do we start?
S3 (09:12):
Oh, look, the.
S1 (09:13):
Policy based management is becoming quite a key facet to
no matter if it's networking or cloud or even your
your on premise devices. So we're seeing more clients looking
to expect, as the gentlemen have mentioned earlier, that it
(09:34):
just works. It's easy to use. And that's where by
using these policy based systems, that allows you to get
to that point, because every machine or every device is
getting the policy that allows them to just function. So
if you're starting out on the journey of trying to
(09:55):
get that control or that desired state across your environment.
It's it's looking at those technologies that allow you to
do it. If you buying in technology, say, at a
networking layer that doesn't support or doesn't think about policy,
and is there still based on that old concept of
(10:17):
put it in and configure it and leave it and
walk away? Um, yeah. It's you're going to struggle to
get to that ease of use. And I think that's
where the likes of HPE Aruba have been able to
bring some of those components together to make that policy.
So the, the, the starting point is looking at the
technologies you're looking to use and how you then roll
(10:39):
out policies that then integrate across your stacks and stuff
so that you are utilizing, um, that capability. The one
thing we do find, David, is that that even if you,
you know, build a beautiful picture and it all works beautifully, Um,
things change, you know? So, uh, six months time, there's
(11:01):
a whole new set of devices, a whole new set
of threats. Um, the the our customers we talk to
that have a, you know, team of people that are
donkey deep in, you know, SSH manually configuring their network.
You know, that was great back in the 90s. But
in six months time, now when a new Apple iPhone
model comes out and suddenly, you know, Apple make a change,
(11:24):
who would have thought they can just go and make
a change that changes the behavior of every device in
the world. But they can and they do. And suddenly
we need to write a different policy that does something
different in response to that change. If I've got to
send a team of guys out, you know, making manual
changes around the network, that's impossible. If I can make
a central policy based change saying, do this now, then,
(11:47):
you know, suddenly I'm okay. And I guess that's that's
the exciting piece in terms of responding to what's happening
in the world. Yeah. Because we're in that in that
environment where changes the norm. Now change used to take
years to come through. Whereas now we're we're talking weeks
or months. And what you can figure today is best
(12:09):
practice is not always best practice in 6 to 8
weeks time. And the customer's requirements are also changing because
they used to work one way and then all of
a sudden they've had to quickly adapt because of the
change of their customer base or their clientele that they service.
(12:30):
So yeah, policy enables you to start doing things like
that too, right? It makes our job a lot easier
to deliver high level services to our clients.
S4 (12:40):
And I guess the the one comment I'll make there too, uh,
is we're really pushing for a user centric view of
the tech that we have. Uh, so that's a really
good example, the iPhone thing, right? They change something, it
throws enterprise, you know, operations teams into a spin. Um,
I've had discussions with very large government organizations and very
(13:04):
small organizations. You know, the size of fish and chip shop.
And as soon as that iPhone change comes in, it
sends them into a spin. We are helpful with our
engineering technology that follows a user and is user centric
and independent of devices in most cases, and that's only
going to get better and better and better. Um, because
then it does enable hopefully, you know, soft source bridge to,
(13:26):
to deliver better services without hiccups associated with a firmware
update in a widget that can prevent a, you know,
a Boeing taking off. We're trying to move past that
and it feels like we're kind of getting there. I
don't think we're there yet, but we're getting there pretty quick.
S1 (13:41):
No, but it is giving us the tools to to
be quicker and respond quicker. Whereas in the past you'd
spend months, as Andrew mentioned, manually configuring or jumping out
to devices to make that one change for that iPhone
to work, whereas now we can sit in a policy
and push it out across the board. And that's what
(14:03):
the world we live in now. We we doesn't matter
if it's Apple or it's Microsoft or it's one of
the other vendors. They're on an agile development cycle. So
anywhere between 6 to 12 weeks to something new coming
from them.
S6 (14:25):
Thanks for joining us on this episode of The Soft Source. Leverage.
Lifting the lid podcast. Join us for part two of
the podcast, where we'll continue our discussion on network as
a service strategies. I'm Barry White signing off. Until next time.
Keep exploring, keep innovating, and we'll see you in the
next episode.
Welcome to another episode of Lifting the Lid on Technology,
your go to insights for the latest tech and innovation.
I'm Barry Weiss, your host and CIO at Soft Source Feedback.
Join us for a special two part discussion where we'll
talk about robust, scalable, and cost effective strategies that will
protect your network into the future. Today, I'm speaking to
(00:27):
Steve Illes and Andrew Fox from HPE Aruba Networking, along
with their own CTO, David Small. Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for
joining me today. Good to see you all. Thanks, Barry.
Good to be here. Yeah. Thanks, Barry. Thank you. I
thought we'd kick things off, and perhaps we could start
(00:48):
with you, Andrew. And your role. You travel up and
down the country as country manager for Australia and New
Zealand for HPE Aruba. You meet a lot of companies.
You need different industries, different sized organizations. What are customers
talking to you about, particularly when it comes to networking?
I look after an amazing team of professionals that work
with our customers across Australia and New Zealand, helping them
(01:12):
to do cool things with their networks. Right. Um, it's
it's a fun place to be. You know, no, no
matter where you are as a, as a customer and
and your journey, that network is absolutely essential to whatever
you're trying to do, whether you're just trying to get
the job done. You need a network. If you're trying
to do I, you need a bigger network, you know? So, um,
(01:34):
there's a conversation with every single customer. Um, and usually
that conversation is, is a revolving around how they can,
how they can do a few key things, how they
can make better use of the investment they make in
their network. Uh, second thing is, you know, how do
they keep themselves off the front page and, you know,
and reduce risk? And, and the third thing is, you know,
(01:57):
with this valuable commodity that is time and money. Um,
how can they do more with less? You know, which
is a really exciting set of conversation to be having.
What are the common bits of feedback I get from
customers around complexity? You know, everybody's finding that their networks
seem to becoming more complex is that you get that
(02:18):
feedback as well from a lot of customers.
S2 (02:20):
We do. And it's really because.
S1 (02:22):
You know, a lot of the time they've built them,
you know, over many years sort of organically, you know,
started with some switching, added some wireless back when when
wireless wasn't really mission critical. Um, now it is absolutely
mission critical. And maybe the thing they've built is not
really up to.
S3 (02:40):
Up to scratch.
S1 (02:41):
Anymore. Um, sort of 5 or 6 years ago, HBO
started talking about, you know, security in the broader sense
of the word. Um, to a lot of our customers now,
they're they're sort of scratching their heads and thinking, how
do we how do we reduce the risk and how
do we up our security game? And of course, the
network plays a really important part in that. So but
(03:04):
it doesn't have to be complex, right? I guess that's
the conversation we're trying to have. There is, you know,
lots of things you can do to try and create
something that is, you know, cohesive, something that that integrates
nicely together, works well with all all the vendors or
all the integrations you need to inside your organization. Reduces risk,
(03:24):
saves you a bit of money. Um, and, you know,
some of the things we're doing with with soft source,
for example, are, are absolutely key to that. How about you, Stephen?
I mean, a similar sort of question, I guess, is
you are I mean, you're you're the you're the SAS
practice leader for South Pacific and for HPE Aruba. What
sort of conversations are you having and what are some
(03:46):
of the challenges, I guess, that customers are sharing with
you as far as their network teams are concerned and
managing their environments? Good question. I mean, I I'm having
a lot of discussions across.
S4 (03:59):
A lot of different verticals across the region and overwhelmingly things.
The landscape is changing, particularly from a vendor, uh, and
a and our reseller partners standpoint, as far as the
scorecard we're having, I'm having far more discussions about scorecards
and how internal teams managing and delivering outcomes on our
(04:22):
networking gear and other in other places. Um, the end
user experience so far, less are we talking about. You know,
the proof is not in the pudding, the proof is
in the eating. And so, as Andrew was saying a
second ago, uh, taking something that was historically, historically complex
(04:43):
and creating really intelligent, you know, software or technology that
can take something that was historically complex and make it
appear incredibly simple. That's what we seem to be doing
really well. Right. Uh, and that that's manifest manifesting things like,
you know, and that's not just a security statement, I guess,
but it's manifest across a bunch of domains being, you know,
(05:08):
we talked about management and our central platform and, um,
you know, our clearpath's technology that takes that perimeter control
and security, something historically very complex and difficult and makes
it seem really easy. And we extend that into, you know,
the sassy tech, too, and the and the acquisitions that
we've made. The reason HPE Aruba Networking acquired, uh, Silver
(05:31):
Peak as the number one security win vendor in the world. Uh,
and access security as a as a startup leading edge
startup is because of the intelligent nature of the technology
to take something incredibly, incredibly complex and make it seem
very simple. And so what I'm having to demonstrate to
customers across the region universally is, once this goes in,
(05:57):
what additional capability does it give us? And what's going
to be our scorecard with our users. How are they
going to look at us? No longer are we, you know,
at the mercy. Mercy of the tyranny of technology. Putting
tech in. But it's secure. But it's really complicated for users.
But it is what it is because that's the nature
of security. We are no longer scored like that when
(06:20):
it goes in. Is it going to make our customers
and users lives better and is it going to be transparent?
So that's overwhelmingly the type of discussions I'm having. Um,
particularly with security, uh, but far broader as well. If
you use.
S1 (06:35):
The term scorecard there a few times. I mean, how
do you how do you how do customers measure that?
How do they measure that performance? And how does some
of those technologies that you've introduced, such as Clearpass and
Silverpeak and so forth, how do they help customers on
that journey?
S4 (06:50):
I'm sure folks will have a have a perspective there.
I'll go first. Um, from my perspective, it's how transparent
it is. It's how invisible it is. So, you know,
if I talk specifically in the in the security realm
for the second, uh, historically, the expectation generally would be
as you make things more secure, it becomes more difficult
(07:10):
for users and things, be it VPN technology, multi-factor authentication,
all of these other things people need to deal with. Uh,
now it's we're being scored against how transparent and invisible
it is. Can we deploy something and can it actually
remove steps from our users and still deliver the same
or better experience? So it's it's how much technology people
(07:33):
don't see after we've put it in is kind of
the lens we're being viewed through. Outfoxing would you have
anything to add to that?
S1 (07:42):
You know, when we first started on the network security journey,
goodness me, probably 15 years ago, uh, when we first
acquired a company called a mega pod, which then became
became ClearPath, that going right back in time. But, um,
you know, network security was was difficult. Um, networks were
built in a very sort of standard way. Uh, and
(08:06):
the security was kind of an add on that you
stuck on top. I guess what's become really exciting over
the last few years is, you know, the network is
the perfect place. You know, it's a first line of
defense to your organization. If people can't get connected, you know,
it's much harder for them to to do anything nasty.
There's now security in every single level of the network. And,
(08:27):
and and as those pieces all come together, it's just
all about keeping customers safe. And it should be invisible
and it should be centrally controlled. It should be managed
by some sort of sensible policy that determines how your
network behaves and how security works. And if your users
know it's there, then maybe we've done something wrong and
(08:47):
we need to look at how it's put together. And
that's why, you know, that's why you need clever people
like Salesforce to bridge to to help get that policy right. Well, look,
it's a good opportunity for, um, Dave, you know.
S5 (08:57):
We start to.
S1 (08:58):
Talk about this, this move towards more policy driven management
of these environments. What are some of the key things
that organizations need to be thinking about there? And I guess,
you know, if you're at the bottom of the mountain
on this, where do we start?
S3 (09:12):
Oh, look, the.
S1 (09:13):
Policy based management is becoming quite a key facet to
no matter if it's networking or cloud or even your
your on premise devices. So we're seeing more clients looking
to expect, as the gentlemen have mentioned earlier, that it
(09:34):
just works. It's easy to use. And that's where by
using these policy based systems, that allows you to get
to that point, because every machine or every device is
getting the policy that allows them to just function. So
if you're starting out on the journey of trying to
(09:55):
get that control or that desired state across your environment.
It's it's looking at those technologies that allow you to
do it. If you buying in technology, say, at a
networking layer that doesn't support or doesn't think about policy,
and is there still based on that old concept of
(10:17):
put it in and configure it and leave it and
walk away? Um, yeah. It's you're going to struggle to
get to that ease of use. And I think that's
where the likes of HPE Aruba have been able to
bring some of those components together to make that policy.
So the, the, the starting point is looking at the
technologies you're looking to use and how you then roll
(10:39):
out policies that then integrate across your stacks and stuff
so that you are utilizing, um, that capability. The one
thing we do find, David, is that that even if you,
you know, build a beautiful picture and it all works beautifully, Um,
things change, you know? So, uh, six months time, there's
(11:01):
a whole new set of devices, a whole new set
of threats. Um, the the our customers we talk to
that have a, you know, team of people that are
donkey deep in, you know, SSH manually configuring their network.
You know, that was great back in the 90s. But
in six months time, now when a new Apple iPhone
model comes out and suddenly, you know, Apple make a change,
(11:24):
who would have thought they can just go and make
a change that changes the behavior of every device in
the world. But they can and they do. And suddenly
we need to write a different policy that does something
different in response to that change. If I've got to
send a team of guys out, you know, making manual
changes around the network, that's impossible. If I can make
a central policy based change saying, do this now, then,
(11:47):
you know, suddenly I'm okay. And I guess that's that's
the exciting piece in terms of responding to what's happening
in the world. Yeah. Because we're in that in that
environment where changes the norm. Now change used to take
years to come through. Whereas now we're we're talking weeks
or months. And what you can figure today is best
(12:09):
practice is not always best practice in 6 to 8
weeks time. And the customer's requirements are also changing because
they used to work one way and then all of
a sudden they've had to quickly adapt because of the
change of their customer base or their clientele that they service.
(12:30):
So yeah, policy enables you to start doing things like
that too, right? It makes our job a lot easier
to deliver high level services to our clients.
S4 (12:40):
And I guess the the one comment I'll make there too, uh,
is we're really pushing for a user centric view of
the tech that we have. Uh, so that's a really
good example, the iPhone thing, right? They change something, it
throws enterprise, you know, operations teams into a spin. Um,
I've had discussions with very large government organizations and very
(13:04):
small organizations. You know, the size of fish and chip shop.
And as soon as that iPhone change comes in, it
sends them into a spin. We are helpful with our
engineering technology that follows a user and is user centric
and independent of devices in most cases, and that's only
going to get better and better and better. Um, because
then it does enable hopefully, you know, soft source bridge to,
(13:26):
to deliver better services without hiccups associated with a firmware
update in a widget that can prevent a, you know,
a Boeing taking off. We're trying to move past that
and it feels like we're kind of getting there. I
don't think we're there yet, but we're getting there pretty quick.
S1 (13:41):
No, but it is giving us the tools to to
be quicker and respond quicker. Whereas in the past you'd
spend months, as Andrew mentioned, manually configuring or jumping out
to devices to make that one change for that iPhone
to work, whereas now we can sit in a policy
and push it out across the board. And that's what
(14:03):
the world we live in now. We we doesn't matter
if it's Apple or it's Microsoft or it's one of
the other vendors. They're on an agile development cycle. So
anywhere between 6 to 12 weeks to something new coming
from them.
S6 (14:25):
Thanks for joining us on this episode of The Soft Source. Leverage.
Lifting the lid podcast. Join us for part two of
the podcast, where we'll continue our discussion on network as
a service strategies. I'm Barry White signing off. Until next time.
Keep exploring, keep innovating, and we'll see you in the
next episode.
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Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.