[bc569a80a344f9c]

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250628599766/en/HPE...

Press release.

It’s interesting that this requires HPE to divest from Instant On, which is their SMB brand. It’s unclear how that alone maintains a competitive landscape for enterprise customers that largely would have chosen Aruba’s more traditional offering.

That said, it’ll be interesting to see what use cases for data centers they come up with. Mist is one of very few infrastructure providers I’ve seen where AI/ML features actually improve operations. Surprisingly often in ways that I’m puzzled competitors have not been able to duplicate: something as simple as sending all access point logs through outlier detection and automated triage to proactively send RMAs for broken hardware before the customer even complains.

[dbmnt]

I’m also puzzled by the Instant On divestiture. In the original filing and press release the DOJ does call out SMB, even though most of the discussion is about enterprise markets:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-block...

My guess is that by forcing HPE to spin off Instant On, the DOJ hopes to score a modest PR win by claiming it protected small businesses, by preserving one of the few turnkey, cloud-native wireless solutions for SMBs. Since Instant On represents only a tiny portion of the deal, though, it seems odd that it was singled out.