The future of the programmable network was on display when company executives, customers and system integrators participated in a set of virtual joint announcements from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s Aruba division and Pensando Inc. on Oct. 19.

The event was covered by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, through numerous interviews. Here are five key insights you might have missed. (* Disclosure below.)

1. HPE and Aruba are pursuing a deliberate strategy to build for the micro branch

The rise of a distributed workforce, mixing onsite with remote contributors, is motivating network solutions providers, such as HPE and its Aruba division, to craft new network architectures. Meeting the needs of the micro branch is high on the list.

The term has found its way into Aruba’s technical documentation through AOS 10x support, which enables remote sites to be configured and managed by the Aruba Central cloud platform. The Aruba portal allows network administrators to manage remote access points through a WLAN or wireless local access network.

HPE made a key acquisition last year that set the table for its micro branch strategy. The company acquired Silver Peak Inc., a SD-WAN technology provider, for $925 million. The purchase strengthened the Aruba Edge Services Platform and connected not only remote branch offices with one another, but also enabled remote workers to access internal applications.

HPE Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri (pictured) made a point to mention the growing role of the micro branch in his appearance during the announcement event with former Cisco Systems Inc. leader and current Pensando chairman John Chambers.

“The original architectures that John pioneered for decades were around the datacenter, campus and the branch,” said Neri, during an interview with theCUBE. “Now you have this extension called the micro branch, which is now home, our home office.”

2. ‘Colos’ are popular and starting to look like public clouds

Colocation compute facilities or “colos” are hot commodities at the moment. The alternative to privately owned datacenters has become an attractive rental option for extra datacenter capacity without requiring the capital expense to build a new one and offers proximity to headquarters operations in many urban areas.

According to a recent Allied Market Research report, the global colocation datacenter industry reached $46 billion last year and is expected to expand to $202 billion over the remainder of the decade.

Many enterprises that move operations to colos are already quite familiar with the cloud and are seeking some of the same experiences found in hyperscale environments. A sign of this can be seen in an agreement announced in July between Digital Realty Inc., one of the largest colo providers, and Zayo Group.

The two firms will collaborate to provide colo customers with an interconnected backbone for datacenters and edge sites that can be provisioned in much the same way that users access a similar service in the public cloud.

“Colocation is a very big trend,” said Alan Weckel, founder and technology analyst at 650 Group LLC, in an interview with theCUBE. “Deploying a colo makes a lot of sense. It creates another pool of data, information that IT managers need to think about in terms of managing out there.”

3. Pensando’s disruptive solution moves the cloud native discussion to the datacenter

Pensando has been developing a distributed services platform that can be deployed as an intelligent card and incorporated into the Aruba switch. The result is a simple way to provision, configure and assign policies to stateful services on top of a rack switch in a datacenter environment.

The solution opens a new opportunity for enterprises seeking to run cloud native applications in the datacenter without having to deploy agents on a server or run additional hardware on the side. It also adds more fuel to the belief that the enterprise will continue to gravitate toward a hybrid model and large public cloud providers will continue to heed this trend.

“The whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive; it was to enable datacenter organizations to basically recreate what hyperscalers are doing,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst and practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group, in a conversation with theCUBE. “We’ve seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed, but the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing datacenters. Everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn’t always mean public cloud only; organizations are actually going to run them in hybrid.”

4. The Aruba/Pensando switch offers a new way to secure east-west traffic and protect the edge

As networks expand in scale from north-south to east-west topologies, the need for security integration takes on added significance. In an east-west model, a compromise of one server that talks to others in the same network can spread with disastrous consequences.

Aruba is positioning the switch with Pensando as an opportunity to extend zero trust that was previously not possible with stateful east-west services or firewalls. The goal is to drive zero trust deeper into the datacenter and all the way to the edge.

Zero trust at the edge becomes especially critical in scenarios where enterprises need to protect remote workers, and Aruba envisions that its Fabric Composer will play a key role in driving secure solutions.

“There’s often a zero trust model you want in the datacenter for segmentation, meaning I’ve got two virtual machines on the same network, on the same host,” explained Simon McCormack, senior manager of product management at Aruba, during an interview with theCUBE. “Normally they can talk to each other, nothing’s stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. Fabric Composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution.”

5. John Chambers brings a competitive spirit and legendary marketing style to the collaboration

It was near the end of his joint appearance with Neri, when John Chambers, who pursued market disruption on behalf of Cisco Systems Inc. for more than 20 years, made a telling point about the opportunity to work with HPE and Aruba on the Pensando deployment.

“It’s fun to take on the big competitors and bring them down, which I love doing,” Chambers said. “It’s also unique to see how fast our teams are moving together. Our cultures are very similar; we set audacious goals for our team and, so far, they’ve been exceeding them.”

In Silicon Valley, where many technology-focused top executives view product marketing with the same enthusiasm as they would a root canal, Chambers is a different breed. He is known for his “Phil Donahue” style of speaking, walking around and engaging with an audience, making points and answering questions, an approach he cultivated over decades as a visible spokesperson for Cisco.

This signature way of communicating was on display during SiliconANGLE’s coverage of Chambers’ appearance at the Collision Tech conference in New Orleans three years ago. Following a presentation in the event’s central keynote hall, Chambers held a press conference on a separate stage outside.

Because the gathering was on a noisy trade show floor, the organizers thoughtfully provided the assembled press with their own microphone to ask questions of the Silicon Valley executive. The first reporter posed a question, Chambers came down off the stage, took the microphone and never let it go, pausing only to hold it in front of the next questioner as he walked among the media throng. Some things will never change.

See the complete interview with Neri and Chambers below. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Aruba and Pensando Announce New Innovations event.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Aruba and Pensando Announce New Innovations” event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE