HPE continues to integrate its networking products with its AI-driven Mist platform and Marvis AI engine, this week bringing the HPE Networking EdgeConnect suite—which combines its SD-WAN and SSE products in a unified SASE offering—into the fold.
The move enables enterprise IT teams to manage and troubleshoot the entire network—from Wi-Fi and campus switches to branch offices, WAN connections, and cloud security—as one connected environment, using AI agents to automate work, Mittal Pareth, senior director of product and solutions marketing for campus and branch networking at HPE, told Network World. Those environments are often managed through separate products and consoles, making it hard to determine if a problem is with Wi-Fi, the WAN, an application, or a security policy, Pareth said.
“The goal of this new capability is to help organizations identify and resolve issues faster, improve application and user experiences, and move toward increasingly autonomous network operations,” Pareth said.
The natural language Mist AI platform and its Marvis AI engine work by gathering telemetry and user state data from HPE Juniper routers, switches, access points, firewalls, and applications to offer actionable insights and automated workflows that can detect and resolve a range of enterprise networking problems. A key part of Marvis is its AI-based Marvis Actions component, which identifies and prioritizes network problem remediation.
Since its Juniper acquisition, HPE has added wireless support in 2016, wired support in 2019, and data center networking support in 2024 under the Mist AI umbrella.
Existing Mist and Aruba Central customers will gain access to advanced SASE capabilities, including application-aware routing, WAN optimization, and integrated security services. In addition, all of the networking platforms will have access to the same Marvis and Mist AI across the board, according to Mittal.
In a blog post explaining how the system works, Gabriel Gomane, HPE senior product marketing manager, wrote:
“In HPE Mist, HPE Mist Networking WAN Assurance aggregates telemetry from HPE Networking EdgeConnect to measure end-user experience using service level expectations (SLEs) and simplify troubleshooting. WAN Insights provides visibility into device status, overlays, interfaces, and network health, with time-series views of key performance metrics such as link utilization, latency, jitter, and packet loss. HPE Marvis actions further help administrators identify network issues and provide recommended actions to accelerate resolution.”
“HPE Aruba Central offers another operational choice. Available next year, HPE Networking EdgeConnect in HPE Aruba Central runs in the same cloud-native platform used to manage wired and wireless networks, with unified visibility across device health, connectivity, alerts, clients, routing, tunnels, and WAN interfaces,” Gomane wrote. “This full-stack context enables teams to move beyond monitoring individual infrastructure components toward understanding and assuring the complete user and application experience. It helps accelerate root-cause identification, surface actionable performance insights, and enables teams to investigate network and security events from a single interface.”
HPE Mist will be available for HPE Networking EdgeConnect this year.
HPE Networking EdgeConnect competes most closely with SD-WAN offerings from Cisco, Fortinet, Cato, and others.