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They’ve been trying to compete in the controller-less WiFi market for a while and it’s not going well. Tons of larger (higher ed, which have complex environments with very many end points) campuses have tried to move to Aruba Central, and subsequently moved back because it isn’t working well.

And there’s huge operational benefits to Mist’s architecture even if you leave out the AI part. My best guess for why Aruba hasn’t been able to replicate at least the architecture is that they’re carrying around too much legacy they can’t break with to make this feasible.

Since they’re nearly explicitly saying “we are buying Juniper for Mist”, and at least in my opinion aren’t doing that only for further developing that portfolio towards the data center, I guess they’ve just decided to buy someone who was able to execute on that architecture shift.