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Phil Mottram is a busy man. When he’s not competing in triathlons, he runs HPE’s rapidly growing Aruba Networking division. A job that ramps up yet further at huge tech shows such as MWC Barcelona 2025, or Mobile World Congress. We were fortunate enough to catch him for an exclusive interview at the show, and even more fortunate that he was in ebullient mood.
Why so cheerful, to paraphrase the Joker? Because there’s a sense of things coming together. AI is bringing a stronger need for compute at the edge of our communication networks, which leans to HPE’s strengths compared to networking specialists such as Cisco.
Even the US Department of Justice filing suit to block HPE’s planned $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks – Mottram is confident that this is a bump in the road rather than a block, saying “we will prevail” – wasn’t enough to dampen his mood.
But before we look to the future, let’s take a step back to see how we got here.
HPE’s foothold into the wider comms world started over two decades ago, Phil explained. “Our background is Wi-Fi. Companies started shifting to access points 21 years ago, we’ve sold 30 million, and if you go to most of the airports in the world, sports stadiums, cruise ships, they’re typically using our technology.” Even the local football club, a minnow named FC Barcelona, uses HPE Aruba Networking access points.
From this point on, HPE’s growth has been like following a set of links. “Ten years ago, I think HPE was doing some elements of this, but it was more in the campus and branch switching. And then it thought, actually, you know what, campus and branch switching typically links to Wi-Fi and so off the back of that, it bought Aruba.”
HPE completed the purchase of Aruba Networks in 2015. “Enterprises are facing a mobile-first world and are looking for solutions that help them transition legacy investments to the new style of IT,” said Meg Whitman, HP’s then Chairman, President and CEO in the press release announcing the deal.
She added: “By combining Aruba’s world-class wireless mobility solutions with HP’s leading switching portfolio, HP will offer the simplest, most secure networking solutions to help enterprises easily deploy next-generation mobile networks.”
At this point, HP was in the process of splitting in two: the printer and PC-focused HP Inc on one side, the enterprise-focused HPE on the other. The board approved the split in October that same year.
So we have the seeming paradox of new, hungry company with worldwide brand recognition. Where to next? After a trio of networking acquisitions, focusing on security and network analysis, it set its sights further afield.
“About five years ago, [HPE] said, well, actually, you know, the Wi-Fi switch connects to the campus and branch, which then goes over something called a wide area network [WAN] to link to a data centre,” said Mottram.
“We’re doing all the data centre stuff, so we’re missing this thing in the middle called the SD-WAN, software defined WAN.” The software element brings intelligence into a WAN – which simply refers to a wireless network that can extend over a wider area, whether a campus or the whole globe – allowing network managers to control and secure it.
This is the point at which HPE bought Silver Peak, a US-based company like Aruba but this time considered a leader in the SD-WAN arena.
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Mottram joined HPE in 2019, with a string of senior positions at telcos on his CV. These include time at BT, Vodafone and Telstra, covering territories as varied as Hong Kong and Boulder, Colorado on the way. Within two years, he was promoted to his current position of Executive Vice President and General Manager of HPE Aruba Networking.
“In the last three years, we’ve expanded in three new areas,” said Mottram. “One, security, because we see network and security converging.” Something Gartner agrees with, he mentions, referencing its SASE framework – this stands for Secure Access Services edge.
“Basically, it picks five areas – two network, three are security. And it says in the future, when enterprise customers are buying networks, they’ll want networking security delivered as one package.”
The five elements are SD-WAN, SWG (secure web gateway to protect against web-based threats using filtering), CASB (cloud access security broker, so intrusion protection), NGFW (next-generation firewall) and ZTNA (zero trust network access).
That left HPE with web-facing security as a weak point if looked at from a SASE point of view. Which is why “we bought an Israeli software company called Axis Security about 18 months ago“. In one stroke, this bolstered HPE in all three security-focused elements.
“Basically what those technologies are allowing you to do is be prescriptive about where people can go on the network,” Mottram explained. “So let’s say Lily is our CFO, and she wants to get access to the finance system. It will let her in. I’m in sales. It’ll say, well, Phil doesn’t need to go into the finance system. We’ll shut him down. So it’s kind of creating a policy/information/security space.”
HPE bought Axis Security in 2023, at roughly the same time it also acquired an Italian company called Athonet. Its expertise: Private 5G. A wide area network, but this time focused in a specific location: “It has, broadly speaking, about eight times the coverage of Wi-Fi”, Mottram said.
“The use cases there are where there’s a lot of outdoor usage or speed is important,” he added. “So very simply, warehouses, ports, military environments, farms, mines, those sorts of use cases.”
While HPE doesn’t plan to enter the telco market to rival the companies Mottram used to work for, this purchase allows it to sell the Private 5G infrastructure – and organisations can then negotiate deals with telcos for the delivery of cellular services.
All of which brings up to date, and slamming against one of the big stories from earlier this year: the U.S. Department of Justice suing to block HPE’s proposed purchase of Juniper Networks.
According to the DoJ, the “acquisition would eliminate competition between two of the three top wireless networking firms, raise prices, and diminish innovation for American businesses”.
Needless to say, HPE takes a different view. “We believe the Department of Justice’s analysis of this acquisition is fundamentally flawed,” begins its press release to announce its opposition to the decision.
It adds: “Consistent with the conclusions reached by all other major antitrust regulators who have reviewed the deal, this transaction brings together two complementary networking offerings and will create a networking player with the scope and scale to more effectively compete with global incumbents.”
What’s more, HPE claims, there “is extensive evidence that shows this acquisition is pro-competitive and the product area that is the focus of the DOJ’s suit – Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) – is characterized by robust competition, with at least eight alternatives to HPE and Juniper”.
All of which takes us to the first full week of March and the world’s biggest telecoms show, MWC Barcelona 2025. It’s telling that the majority of HPE’s demos on the showfloor focused on AI, including this demonstration of the HPE ProLiant Compute DL384 Gen12.
And AI is already having an impact on telcos. “[They’re] deploying AI to help them get better at managing their networks and customer service,” said Mottram. Plus, “operators are building AI clouds to be able to offer those services to their customers, and they are typically targeting either sovereign clients, because data sovereignty is becoming more of an issue recently, and the other one is they’re targeting companies who would value putting their applications close to the edge.”
As an example, he suggested that we set up an autonomous vehicle driving company. “Where are we going to host our application? One option is public cloud, or why don’t we host it with the telco? Because they’ve got 100 data centres across the UK. They can replicate the application, and the application will be very close to the traffic light, so when I drive up, it’s not got some huge latency.”
This, he explains, is why AI is so important to HPE as a whole, while “on the Aruba Networking side we have lots of enterprise products that telcos take and sell to their customers”.
Enterprise products such as the two HPE launched at the show: the HPE Aruba Networking CX 8325P network switch and telco-focused HPE ProLiant Compute DL110 Gen12.
