HPE will acquire SD-WAN company Silver Peak for $925m.

Now, the Software-Defined Wide Area Network company will be combined with HPE’s Aruba Networks.

The transaction is expected to close at the end of the year, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Combined force

SD-WAN simplifies the management and operation of an area network by decoupling the networking hardware from control mechanisms.

“HPE was an early mover in identifying the opportunity at the edge and that trend is accelerating in a post-Covid world," Antonio Neri, president, and CEO of HPE said:

“With this acquisition, we are accelerating our edge-to-cloud strategy to provide a true distributed cloud model and cloud experience for all apps and data wherever they live."

HPE said Silver Peak’s SD-WAN offerings would complement Aruba’s Edge Service Platform with optimization from Silver Peak, making edge-to-cloud deployments a lot easier to manage.

Aruba's own product brochure said a better optimized AI-backed SD-WAN could meet growing bandwidth demands surrounding the edge.

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

"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.”