Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today announced that for the fifteenth year, HPE (Aruba) has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant in Gartner Inc.’s latest “Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure”, and is positioned furthest to the right in Vision, as compared to all vendors. In addition, in the companion “Critical Capabilities for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure” report, Aruba has received the highest score in all six use cases – the second time it has scored highest across all use cases.

Read complimentary copies of the Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities reports here:

2020 Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure

2020 Critical Capabilities for Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure

Read Aruba’s blog about this year’s reports here:

Aruba and the Gartner Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure Magic Quadrant

Gartner evaluates vendors included in the Magic Quadrant based on two primary criteria: completeness of vision and ability to execute. HPE (Aruba) was positioned the furthest in vision of all vendors in the quadrant, which Aruba believes recognizes the company’s continued innovation and ability to anticipate and address customer challenges.

In addition, in the companion piece to the Magic Quadrant, the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure, Gartner evaluated vendor effectiveness in addressing an organization’s needs in six key use cases: Unified Wired and WLAN Access, WLAN-only Refresh/New Build, Wired-only Refresh/New build, Remote Branch Office with Corporate HQ, Performance Stringent Applications, and Hands-off NetOps. Aruba received the highest scores in all six of these use cases.

“Our ‘Customer First, Customer Last’ culture drives our commitment and focus across the entire Aruba organization from building our products and delivering our services, to helping our customers and partners in the field and supporting them on the back-end,” said Michael Dickman, senior vice president of Product Management at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “The continued recognition by Gartner of HPE (Aruba) is gratifying and we couldn’t be prouder of our clear market leadership via Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform). The networking landscape may have changed over the past 15 years with different vendors coming and going but Aruba’s commitment to customer-driven innovation has kept us on the forefront at every step, becoming the Edge authority that the market turns to time and again. We are grateful to our customers and partners for their continued trust.”

In addition to the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure and Critical Capabilities reports, HPE (Aruba) has also been recognized by Gartner for other aspects of its industry-leading portfolio. In September 2020, just two years after launching its SD-Branch solution, Aruba was recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, and Silver Peak, recently acquired by HPE (Aruba) was positioned as a Leader for the third consecutive year. HPE (Aruba) was also positioned as a Visionary in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking.

By: Keerti Melkote, Founder and President of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

While the world is dealing with the worst health and economic crisis of the past century, there’s been a subtle shift in the public narrative. We’ve moved from the shock of the pandemic to thinking about how to ease back to some sense of normalcy with a phased approach to reopening economies. But if you’re a business owner, how do you prepare for recovery?

One thing is certain: It’s unlikely we’ll all head back to work at the same time. And even when we do, our physical workplaces will look different. How will we reconfigure office buildings to maintain social distancing while ensuring productivity? And what about the schools that educate our children? What will learning look like in our near-future? These are all things we will need to consider as we shift into recovery mode.

At Aruba, we have begun talking to customers and community leaders about these challenges. I wanted to share our thoughts on things to consider as we emerge from this global business disruption.

1. Workforces will continue to work remotely.

Several large companies—including HPE—have said that while businesses begin to ease back to normalcy, they will not require team members to return to the physical office. In a recent article, Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, said, “Our work-from-home guidance will not be lifted just because government orders are removed; we will only reopen sites when we feel we are in the best position to welcome back team members safely. We will modify our sites to ensure physical distancing can be maintained, and we won’t all return at once. Most importantly, returning to the office will be voluntary.” These words echo sentiments across the global business community, which means that remote work is here to stay—at least for a while.

As the home becomes the primary place where mission-critical work gets done, organizations have to adapt their IT postures to account for this new reality. The edge of the enterprise footprint gets even more distributed giving rise to new concerns around security, visibility and user experience. Should IT provide the tools for work at home? What should those tools be? Is it simply a laptop and a set of cloud/web applications or is it more? Does it include connectivity, security, and application assurance for carrying out mission-critical work? Many Aruba customers have chosen to not only provide the computing environment, but a secure networking environment at home so employees get the same network experience as they do at their workplace. No need to VPN in to work, so to speak. Simply turn on your device and start using it like you naturally do at work. The connectivity and security are taken care of for you just like it is at work. Also, IT gets to have visibility into this remote work environment in order to troubleshoot, maintain and monitor for security compliance.

2. Rise of the automated edge.

As the Edge footprint increases, our ability to reach out and touch it has vastly diminished. All due to COVID-19. Everything at the Edge must be done remotely from an IT standpoint, which means Edge infrastructures at homes, branches, stores, warehouses, or other places will all need to be deployed and managed in a zero-touch manner. This means everything must be instrumented for automation and remote management. Cloud-managed solutions with advanced AIOps capabilities will play a large role in how these distributed environments will be deployed and managed.

3. Healthcare capabilities become part of the business recovery mix.

While the world’s leading researchers race to uncover a vaccine, governments realize that the key to recovery is an increase in COVID-19 testing. The ability to test, track contacts, and quarantine those infected hinges on the ability to test large numbers of the population. As the healthcare community continues to shift with these changing priorities, we will continue to support them with Rapid Response healthcare solutions that allow secure connectivity. Whether they are planning for pop-up testing, a triage tent, or a makeshift hospital in a stadium to prepare for a surge in patients, Aruba will be there to help.

4. Education shifts to a hybrid model.

As we speak to customers in the education space, their challenges start to sound similar to those of enterprise business customers: How do we bring students back to physical locations while maintaining social distancing? How do we engage students when online learning stretches into an extended timeframe? And what are the resulting implications in how educators and planners prepare their education and technology plans to support these new learning models?

Aruba will continue to support our education customers and partners as they navigate these challenging times. We’re here to help them configure their network infrastructure to get the most from the collaboration solutions they choose – whether Teams, Zoom, or something else.

5. Supply chains become a key differentiator.

As the pandemic leaves behind a trail of disruption, everyone will evaluate how they can plan for more resilient supply chains that can withstand future pandemics or similar global disruptions like this one. Aruba has done well in our supply chain execution and it is due to the resiliency we implemented across our supply chain plans.

Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced it has been recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls. This marks the 11th time Fortinet has been recognized in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls for completeness of vision and ability to execute.

John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet said, “We believe Fortinet delivers the broadest and most complete security platform in the industry. We have pioneered the Security-driven Networking approach, integrating security into every element of the network and enabling customers to protect any edge, at any scale. Fortinet has been named a Leader in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewall. Fortinet also recently announced its placement as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. We credit our continued successes to our ongoing commitment to innovation, unique and flexible security platform, and approach to securing the entire attack surface – whether on-prem or in the cloud.”

Fortinet’s FortiGate Next-generation Firewalls (NGFWs) are an integral component of Fortinet’s Security Fabric platform, which provides broad visibility and protection across the entire attack surface. Fortinet FortiGate NGFWs protect any edge and at any scale because they are powered by purpose-built Security Processing Units (SPUs) resulting in the industry’s highest Security Compute Rating. Fortinet continues to drive innovation with its Secure SD-WAN offering as well, with advanced routing and industry’s most flexible security options via an integrated NGFW or SASE-based cloud-delivered security. 

Fortinet believes its placement in the Leaders quadrant is largely due to the company’s ongoing commitment to offer a Security-driven Networking approach, which integrates security into every element of the network and enables customers to:

• Manage operational and security risks for better business continuity: Digital transformation offers tremendous opportunities for businesses to create value and realize efficiencies. However, it also creates new security risks, such as expanding the attack surface for would-be cyber adversaries. With Fortinet NGFWs, customers can achieve full visibility into their networks, applications, and potential threats. Fortinet offers the industry’s highest Security Compute Rating through the power of the company’s purpose-built Secure ProcessingUnits (SPUs – e.g. NP7) to deliver optimal user experience at any scale.  
• Reduce Cost and Complexity: As the digital attack surface expands, security teams must also expand their defense capabilities. Fortinet NGFWs allow customers to build defense in depth through segmentation, dynamic trust, and advanced security inspection to keep operations running. FortiGate NGFWs protect business applications with AI-powered and ML-powered FortiGuard services, eliminating the need of point products and resulting in optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Improve Operational Efficiencies: A single-pane-of-glass management enabled by Fabric Management Center provides a complete and consolidated view across a variety of network edges, on-prem or in the cloud. Fabric Management Center provides automation, and orchestration for the Security Fabric that extends to 400+ ecosystem integrations. This simplifies enterprise-wide workflows across FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, and Ecosystem Partners.

Building off the power of Security-driven Networking and our industry-leading FortiGate NGFWs, Fortinet also offers industry’s most flexible and hyperscale security solutions to meet escalating and often unpredictable capacity needs that can quickly outpace an organization’s security solution performance capabilities.

In addition to being recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls, Fortinet was named a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Network Firewalls. Fortinet believes that this additional customer validation further highlights that Fortinet’s simple, secure, and scalable platform approach resonates with customers across all industries.