In light of the news that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is now launching solutions designed to remove barriers for mass Internet of Things (IoT) adoption, Jeremy Cowan talked exclusively to Chris Kozup, vice president of Marketing, to understand Aruba’s strategy.
IoT Now: In HPE Aruba’s view, how widely will your existing enterprise customers deploy IoT between now and 2020?
Chris Kozup: The opportunity of IoT is a very broad one. HPE Aruba customers are deploying IoT devices at a rapid pace across all vertical markets, but especially within the healthcare, retail and general enterprise, local government and industrial segments.
Today, IoT devices are being used to support a variety of use cases, from connected workplaces and healthcare facilities, to smart cities with intelligent energy meters and utilities supporting businesses with smart lighting and HVAC systems.
IoT is still an emerging market; however, by 2020 we expect mainstream adoption with a large number of consumer and enterprise use cases.
IoT Now: What is Aruba’s strategy to support them? And what’s your USP in the Internet of Things?
CK: We are focused on helping our customers to better realise the promise of IoT through removing the barriers to adoption, within both the public and wide area space.
In order to provision thousands of endpoints and get them connected, organisations need tools for identifying, automating and securing all devices on the network. That’s where we’re focusing our technology development, as well as providing solutions for extracting data from billions of connected things and making that information actionable.
We’re lowering the cost of IoT by optimising the lifecycle of IoT devices. By reducing IoT connectivity, compute and control costs and embracing open interoperability standards to harmonise device communications, we are arming organisations with tools to dramatically change the economics and viability of large-scale IoT deployments. These tools, a combination of infrastructure and software platforms, help us deliver to the vast number of use cases that constitute IoT today.
There are four pillars within our IoT strategy in order to accelerate our customer’s transformation to an IoT world. They are to capitalise on mobility to grow in the enterprise campus segment, capture branch opportunities during customers’ move to broadband, accelerate innovation and efficiency for Industrial IoT customers, and connect diverse IoT devices with a common data and application platform.
We are uniquely differentiated to deliver on this by taking a software-powered, multi-vendor approach to mobile-first networks, and leveraging managed service provider relationships and investments into cloud networking. We are embracing a first-mover advantage with converged systems at the edge with Edgeline, and offering a unique, single point of responsibility for the solution.
IoT Now: Does HPE Aruba expect to offer its own end-to-end IoT services, including connectivity, devices, gateways, back office systems (CRM to billing), security, and integration?
CK: Providing a single point of responsibility for our customer’s IoT deployments is realised through a combination of HPE products, and solutions and integration services from our partner ecosystem. HPE is delivering the Aruba Mobile First Platform and the HPE Universal IoT Platform to support IoT devices at the edge that are connected by a variety of technologies, including LAN, WAN and cellular, along with low power technologies such as LoRa and BLE.
On use cases, as an example, Aruba Mobile First Platform technologies were used at Rio de Janeiro International Airport just before the opening of the 2016 Olympics to improve airport operations and bring passengers an improved travel experience.
Aruba and Accenture Digital partnered to develop a new mobile application for passengers that provides flight status information and wayfinding, along with customised push notifications, to make it easier for passengers to find their gate, restaurants and other airport vendors and services. We are now working with the airport to enhance the app to speed up check-in, security and boarding.
For the HPE Universal IoT Platform, we are partnering with Inmarsat for an IoT solution that is improving crop yields and profitability at a palm oil plantation in Malaysia. The HPE Universal IoT Platform connects sensors on palm trees that monitor environmental conditions such as water, temperature and humidity. Data is then sent over the Inmarsat network to a cloud data centre where it is analysed. The solution can even detect monkeys in the palm groves trying to steal the IoT sensors so they can be chased away.
At HPE Discover London last week, we announced the Aruba ClearPass Universal Profiler and the Aruba 2540 IoT-ready Switches, along with new IoT ecosystem partners. ClearPass Universal Profiler automatically identifies the attributes of IoT devices as they attempt to connect to the network. This enables IT managers to produce a fingerprint for all IoT devices, whether wired and wireless, and assign specific policies to each one.
The Aruba 2540 IoT-Ready Switches further protect IoT devices with unified role-based access. This feature identifies and assigns roles to IoT devices as they connect, prioritising business-critical applications and controlling what network resources the device can access.
The new capabilities announced this week at HPE Discover for the HPE Universal IoT Platform include its lightweight M2M standards support; it delivers plug-and-play interoperability between IoT devices and IoT services. It also offers expanded device management, allowing management of both SIM and non-SIM based devices across different systems, devices, and applications. Finally, it brings increased LoRa gateway support, enabling the use of multiple LoRa gateways with a common set of applications to simplify devices provisioning and control in heterogeneous LoRa environments
HPE also is addressing compute for IoT devices at the edge with HPE Edgeline.
Launched in June, Edgeline is the world’s first converged infrastructure solution that is purpose-built for IoT and network edge applications where the use case demands local processing to mitigate latency. Edgeline integrates and converges enterprise-class compute, storage and systems, and device management, along with Operational Technologies (OT) data capture and control systems. They are the industry’s first systems to integrate high-performance, scalable OT and IT functions all in one box.
The new Aruba ClearPass Exchange ecosystem partners address security for IoT solutions.
About our partners, I can tell you that Attivo Networks is an award-winning provider of deception-based technologies for in-network threat detection, attack forensic analysis and continuous threat response. The Attivo Networks ThreatMatrix Deception and Response Platform deceives attackers into engaging by turning the network into a trap with decoys and deception lures.
Attackers that have circumvented prevention security systems, then reveal themselves and can be blocked and quarantined. The Attivo platform works with Aruba ClearPass to establish policies that automatically disable devices that are experiencing attacks from internal or external threat actors.
Niara is active in the emerging user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) market. The Niara Behavioural Analytics platform detects security threats on the inside such as compromised users, hosts and devices, negligent employees and malicious insiders.
Niara leverages Aruba ClearPass to identify and profile users, IoT and other IP-enabled devices in order to detect attacks based on changes in normal traffic and IT activity and to take action to remove the unauthorised devices or users from the network.
There are now more than 30 ecosystem partners for HPE Edgeline, including General Electric, who use Edgeline on the GE Predix IoT Platform for enterprises who need compute, storage and analytics on-site, right next to where the data is generated.
At HPE Discover, HPE announced new Edgeline ecosystem partners, including PTC and National Instruments, for a solution that analyses pumps and other factory floor IoT devices that provide early warnings of potential failures to allow maintenance techs to correct an issue before it becomes a major problem. Another new Edgeline partner is OSIsoft, who use Edgeline to store, manage and access time-series data for OT and IoT devices to improve data management capabilities.
IoT Now: Will HPE Aruba have the expertise to support challenges in all industries from agriculture through to wearable consumer devices? Or will you specialise in key industry verticals such as automotive, fleet & transport, eHealth, and so on?
CK: HPE currently supports a wide variety of use case with IoT deployments, including smart cities, smart buildings and utilities, connected health, connected vehicles, telco and communications (including enabling CSPs to provide IoT services), retail and entertainment, manufacturing and Industry 4.0, and connected campus.
Aruba is a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.
The author of this article is Jeremy Cowan, editorial director & publisher of IoT Now, IoT Global Network, and VanillaPlus.
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