Extreme Networks announced plans to acquire Aerohive, which has most of its revenues in Enterprise WLAN.  The deal was a surprise, as evidenced by the 40% price premium paid on on HIVE.  After this deal closes, Extreme's WLAN business will be the combination of three WLAN businesses - the traditional WLAN business from Enterasys (Ottawa based team), the Motorola Wireless WLAN business (acquired by Zebra, then sold to Extreme) and Aerohive.  Each of these three businesses had strengths, for instance, the Ottawa team had designed a product line that had high performance in crowded venues - Extreme has enjoyed a long relationship with the NFV; the Motorola team had designed systems that were effective in retail and logistics (as a consequence of Motorola's ownership of Symbol Tech, a bar code scanner company); and Aerohive, which was as of 1Q19 the #2 revenue player in cloud-managed WLAN services and with a strong presence in the US K-12 vertical.  While there is certainly some risk that Extreme does not integrate the Aerohive business effectively, there are some interesting aspects to this deal.
#1: Aerohive's cloud-managed WLAN services is a significant player in the market.  We expect many small and medium businesses will adopt cloud-managed WLAN, and Extreme had a less mature offering here.  We see this as the primary benefit of the Aerohive acquisition.
#2: Aerohive's vertical market exposure in US K-12 (education) market and the managed care part of the health care industry are a nice addition to Extreme.  These markets are additive.
#3: Aerohive had a SD-WAN product that while not a big revenue generator will be important for Extreme in selling to small and medium sized businesses.  We expect the SMEs and branch offices will be upgrading using a SD-Branch approach, where upgrades to WLAN, switching and SD-WAN will be done at once.  Extreme had a hole here and Aerohive fills it.
#4: Aerohive had a new product, A3, which we categorized as Enhanced Network Access Control.  The front end of this product is very modern.  Extreme also had its own NAC product.  Our hunch is the company will merge the two, taking the best of both.  We see larger enterprises as demanding this type of support.  HPE Aruba sells its Clearpass product in a wireless+wired+ENAC bundle to larger sized business, just as Cisco sells its ISE and wireless+wired bundle.  
#5: Aerohive has 802.11ax products.  We expect that increasingly, as customers adopt 802.11ax, with its expected throughput under high loads exceeding 1 Gb/sec, this will drive an upgrade cycle to switches with MultiGigabit support.  Extreme cited "cross selling" in its announcement of this deal, and we agree that customers in the 802.11ax world will be increasingly buying new switches when they adopt new wireless.

This deal was a surprise because Extreme already has WLAN in its portfolio, but if Extreme executes on this business transaction effectively, it can solidify its position in the mid-market by offering cloud services and SD-WAN (through a SD-Branch bundle) and potentially move both up market (with ENAC) and if it choses, downmarket by maintaining a business practice that Aerohive rolled out well over a year ago that can be described as a "freemium" model for its cloud-managed WLAN services.

MACSec Helps Pave the Way to End-to-End Data Security

As consumers and businesses put more data in the Cloud, the importance of securing that data increases.  In just the last year, we have seen advanced threats and attacks by various entities to hack into that data and hyperscalers push back with both public and private mechanisms. Securing that data goes beyond just basic encryption or securing a server, and the role of the network is critical to better protection of data.

Many cloud customers are looking at providing end-to-end security to ensure, as best they can, that data can not be compromised.  MACSec plays an important role in the future on how networks talk to each other and how the secure transmission of data between different locations.  Security is especially important with 400 Gbps, as Cloud providers adopt 400 Gbps, it is not only being used for transmission within the data center but also Data Center Interconnect (DCI).  Cloud workloads will increasingly require secure connectivity between data centers.

Looking at the Ethernet Switch and Router markets, we project the percent of ports shipping with MACSec will increase significantly over our forecast horizon.  We expect vendors will continue to offer versions with and without MACSec, but as we move forward in time and have more purpose-built offerings for the hyperscalers that some products will only ship with MACSec.

The additional features and functionality included in Ethernet switches and Routers are positive for the industry.  It not only increases features which help grow ASPs and revenues, but it also increases the amount of Ethernet ports shipped by expanding the number of use cases.  400 Gbps DCI is a great example of feature and addressable market expansion.

By Alan Weckel, Founding Analyst, 650 Group.

Mellanox and Arista May Announcements

New Switches & Routers Spell New Possibilities 

The hyperscale, cloud and hyper converged industry — despite a pause in data center equipment growth in Q1, as we reported last week—  saw two major Ethernet product announcements so far this month. 
 
Both new platforms, announced by Mellanox and Arista respectively, are supercharged to take the data center to the next level. They play into all of the big trends of cloud hosted, mass virtualization and automation of trouble shooting through telemetry.  They also seem to set some new performance records.




Details: 
First there is Mellanox, unveiling this week its “Ethernet Cloud Fabric” (aka ECF) new switches underpinned by its  Spectrum2 chipset. Mellanox is emphasizing automated troubleshooting with telemetry, support of virtualization, scale to 400GbE, and a fully shared buffer architecture for improved performance in hyper scale cloud environments.

Mellanox ECF Platform Highlights:

• Mellanox “What Just Happened” (WJH) Telemetry: Offers improved visibility as to the root cause of network/server problems while reducing the amount of telemetry data that needs to be stored.
• Spectrum2 chipset, developed in house, has a fully shared buffer architecture for better microburst absorption. The new switches fairly and predictably divide traffic between servers. 
  • Fairness is an issue for ESF and ECF use cases.  It is found in Hadoop, CEPH, and SAP environments. This is where fair and predictable performance matters. 
  •  For ECF in clouds. You have to stop one tenant from robbing resources of others, whereas neighboring tenants might get robbed of another performance. 
• Virtualization:  Mellanox makes better spine switches with increased visibility, performance and virtualization support of VXLANs.   
• 200 Gigabit: The 200GbE switches will be useful for high speed applications like Machine Learning and NVMEoF.  
• 200GbE will also be deployed in volume by hyperscaler / social media companies. Some large customers prefer 200G over 400G for the larger radix as it can eliminate a switching tier in a large data center

ECF Performance:

• 8.33 Billion Packets per second 
• 42MB Monolithic and fully shared packet buffer to provide high bandwidth and low-latency cut-through performance
• Robust RoCE Datapath to enable hardware accelerated data movement for Ethernet Storage Fabric and Machine Learning applications
• Half a million flexible forwarding entries to support large Layer-2 and Layer-3 networks

Next is the announcement from stalwart cloud player Arista, and it has delivered its own new products, its' R3 Series routing platforms. The emphasis is on massive throughput, density, power efficiency and price performance. 



R3 Platform Highlights

• Throughput: Packet processing offers 8X the throughput of the previous generation R1 Series and 5X the throughput of the R2 Series. 
• 400G Ethernet: high-density 400G ports across all platforms to support these next-generation networks.
• New Capabilities: New R3 packet processing silicon offers significant enhancements in route scale, security and telemetry. .
• Wide Range of Form Factors: The new R3 Series comes in a wide range of form factors, including four fixed form factors, an upgrade to our award winning 7500 family, and the brand new 7800 modular chassis with up to 460 Tbps capacity per chassis

Key Capabilities 

• The Arista 7280R3 delivers unparalleled Performance with Dynamic Deep Buffers and VOQ for Lossless forwarding
• Flexible design choices for 10G/25G/40G/50G/100G and 400G
• FlexRoute™ and EOS NetDB™ for internet peering with high density and low power
• Embedded Accelerated sFlow and IPFIX for high capacity network security and application monitoring
• Flexible pipeline for programmable features including Algorithmic ACLs and Inband Network Telemetry for flow and packet forensic

We attended the Open19 Foundation Summit 2019 in San Jose, CA.  The key message of the leadership team of the Foundation was that it expects 2019 to be the year where Open19 systems begin shipping.  Yuval Bachar, President of the Foundation explained that there are 8-10 companies that are deploying or seriously considering, including two mega data center operators in process of evaluation and at least 6 adopters in advanced evaluation/deployment.  Open19 does not specify what technology will be inside the systems; it only defines the form factor.  Interestingly, GPU and ARM designs are included and we heard about AMD CPU more often than we did Intel.  
 
VaporIO made a presentation about its edge data center systems.  Matt Trifiro, CMO of VaporIO explained that its systems nominally consume up to 165 kw in a 9 foot round datacenter.  It claims that Vapor IO is deploying in 6 cities, 3 to 4 data centers in each city.

ASUS and a new company, German Edge Cloud, both made interesting presentations.  Salim Fedel, Associate VP Enterprise Solutions Business Group, ASUS, presented a few of the company's Open19 oriented products, Alps19, Brick and its Network Switch.  Jason Rylands, VP of Data Center Strategy & International Sales, German Edge Cloud, made a very interesting presentation about its company's activities in Germany on how it is participating in the manufacturing industry in Germany.  There is reticence on putting manufacturing data and control on the cloud, but there is a desire to build a German-only computing system, driven in part by GDPR and part by the nation's focus on manufacturing - that's the opportunity.  German Edge Cloud has decided to use Open19 systems - accessing only the front of the racks is a big deal, it believes.

German Edge Cloud shared many examples of how it is engaging with manufacturers for real-time error tracking during the manufacturing process, using analytics, and sharing information between various companies in the German supply chain.

​We attended media briefings at the Keysight World conference held near San Francisco, California, yesterday.  Keysight World San Francisco showed a more integrated Ixia as well as a further push towards 5G, automotive and energy, and data center and telecom.  Much of the companies conversations during the event related to synergies between these technologies.  Such as how to push the automotive industry forward using 5G and the need for edge computing in 5G.  As Keysight is involved at the beginning of the launches of many new cellular technologies, it has good insights into the timeline and progress of the 5G market.

One of our key takeaways from the show is the increased pervasiveness of Ethernet in the telecom and automotive industry as well as the significant increase in constant data creation.  All this data will need robust, and more intelligent networks to transport it.  We were also impressed that Keysight World will actually take place in 10 cities around the world, with San Francisco being the first.

Another interesting observation was just how global Keysight was in looking at products, for example in one session that we attended, much of the automotive effort in the company was located in Germany.

According to news reports and press and social media announcements by high-ranking members of US government, the US government has put Huawei on its so-called "Entity List" of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS).  Our read on this is it similar to what happened with ZTE during C2Q18 last year, a move that severely curtailed ZTE's shipments and revenue until ZTE made concessions and was removed from the list.  Many, but not all, Huawei products use technology only available from US suppliers. US-made semiconductors are the most significant Entity List target that Huawei needs to ship its products.  Significant US semiconductor suppliers to Huawei include Intel, Xilinx, and Broadcom.  

Huawei is such a significant vendor in many of our coverage areas, including Mobile Radio Access Networks (RAN), Ethernet Switching, and Servers, for instance, that we feel it is a good time to point out that 2019 market-level estimates may be at risk.  Additionally, since Chinese cloud services players, like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent cannot delay their capital infrastructure build-outs, alternate suppliers may benefit.

We think it comes as no surprise to Huawei that the US is putting it under pressure.  Just over a year ago, we attended the Huawei analyst summit (April 16, 2018) and its then-chairman said in response to the question "Will Huawei find alternate suppliers for data center products, "Today, Intel is the dominant player.  Our point of view, we look forward to a more diversified landscape; but we work with Intel mainly now."  Additionally, at Huawei's most recent analyst summit (mid-April 2019), the three main keynote speakers, all high-ranking executives of the company spoke about how much progress Huawei has made in developing in-house semiconductors and what its plans are to continue developing more.  We do, however, think that despite Huawei's diversification efforts that it still has significant reliance upon key US chip companies.

The main message of Ribbon keynotes was that Ribbon has moved from a voice and SBC focus to a broader scope including data and analytics, such as UCaaS, Security-as-a-Service, Service Assurance-as-a-Service, SIP Trunking-as-a-Service, SD-WAN, and analytics.  The company identified two major catalysts to the change in company scope: the August 2018 acquisition of enterprise SBC company Edgewater and the February 2019 acquisition of analytics company, anova. Additionally, the company confirmed that it is not pursuing service provider mobile market opportunities such as EPC or “full IMS” that are components of larget mobile equipment larger vendors.  Instead, Ribbon is pursuing the mobile market by offering overlay analytics services that allow SP customers to derive value from mobile operators using monetization, network, marketing, and customer care.  

The company’s core business is evolving.  For instance, the company has doubled down on the Enterprise market with its Edgewater acquisition, and a result, it emphasized that it is unique because it has both service provider and enterprise SBC product offerings.  The company has offered SBC on public cloud and reiterated that this capability has been available for one year.  The company highlighted that it has a Tier-1 Mobile Network Operator VoLTE Interconnect contract win. 

Analytics.  The company sees its opportunity in the analytics market is to deliver technology to the customer for the following cases:
•             Monetization (Targeting, Advertising, Sponsored Data, Campaign Efficacy)
•             Network (Reduce Network Cost, Improved Quality of Experience, Proactive Alarms, Network Service Assurance)
•             Marketing (Service bundles, churn reduction, product insights, inferred demographics)
•             Customer Care (customer experience, bill shock, most probably cause)

We are impressed with Ribbon’s technical capabilities when it comes to using GPUs.  The company has previously discussed the performance of its GPU based media interworking function as being 3.5x more powerful than a DSP-based system, or 9x more powerful than a CPU-based system and over 2x more power efficient.  The company says its GPU-based systems are generally available for its D-SBC and i-SBC functions.  It has evaluations at three operators: Tier-1 US MNO, Tier-1 US CSP, and Tier-1 Japan CSP.  We would not be surprised if some of these customers begin deploying soon.  One of its Tier-1 operators found that the GPU-based system costs half as much in capital spending and is 800% more power efficient. 

​Kandy, the white-label voice/messaging services brand of Ribbon discussed its success with customers such as BT, NUWAVE, AT&T, Hong Kong Broadband, Optus, and ecosystem partner, Five9.  It enables UCaaS, CPaaS and WebRTC services.  The company reiterated that it plans to go to market with partners, mainly service providers, instead of opening its own store-front that would compete with service providers.  The company says its customer pipeline is growing.

Huawei hosted 700 analysts and media participants in Shenzhen China last week to attend its annual analyst summit, nick-named HAS2019.  The company's high-level message was simple - the company is an innovator and is moving down the stack into semiconductors and is partnering with and funding university projects to develop basic research.  This year’s message was different from than the prior-year meeting, but several transformative events have occurred between this meeting and the prior year's, most notably the 2Q18 shipment ban on ZTE, the US / China trade dispute and US efforts to thwart Huawei’s participation in the 5G infrastructure of its allies.  Interestingly, during HAS2019, the Apple and Qualcomm announced their chip-supply and patent settlement, Samsung announced its foldable phone (which has been met with criticism), and Ericsson & Swisscom announced that the operator went live with its 5G network.  All three of non-Huawei events highlighted the importance of Huawei’s chips and innovation announcements.

The company made announcements in its main keynote presentations on day one about seven different chip projects delivered recently or planned shortly.  Chip-level is unusual for what are typically high-level presentations from a keynote-level presentation.  These chips (seen in accompanying pictures) are:

• Ascend 310/910.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) chip for cloud (leads to its Data Center Ethernet Switch iLossLess cloud service)
• OptiXtreme H6 oDSP.  Optical transmission Digital Signal Processor (DSP).
• Hi 1822.  FC/IP chip used for products including Solid State Drives (SSDs)
• Atlas 200 AI acceleration for AI computing intended for September 2019 announcements at Huawei Connect
• Tiangang 5G Basestation chipset
• Balong chip series intended for 5G smartphones and other Customer Premises Equipment (CPE)
• Kungpeng ARM chips for computing

The company shared more details about other chips in breakout sessions on the second and third days of the conference, as well.  The point we are making, though, is that upper-level management provided significant detail about semiconductor developments at Huawei.

The company shared more details about other chips in breakout sessions on the second and third days of the conference, as well.  The point we are making, though, is that upper-level management provided significant detail about semiconductor developments at Huawei.  Another relevant semiconductor-related point to make is that the company is de-emphasizing its reliance on Intel-based architecture and instead is focusing on devices such as ARM-based processors, as well as GPU, FPGA and NPU semiconductors.
We would be remiss if we did not mention some of the system-level announcements and observations related to 5G that were made at the HAS2019 conference, which include:

• MU-MIMO.  Of Huawei’s 70,000 shipments of 5G base stations as of the show, 97% were MU-MIMO based.  The company expects MU-MIMO to be deployed not only in urban areas but also in rural areas.
• SingleRAN Pro.  The company is taking an architectural approach that is different from what some service providers in the world want; it is delivering an integrated product approach where multiple frequencies and base stations are integrated into the same enclosures.  This converged approach is different from the architectural approach being promoted by some smaller vendors like Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless, which uses the O-RAN standard and features a disaggregation between various components like antenna and base band processing.  Huawei’s rationale is that it is less expensive on capital spending and operational spending to use the integrated approach.
• Converged Mobile Packet Core.  The company plans to have 1H19 commercial availability of its 2G/3G/4G/5G NSA/5G SA packet core system.  In slides depicting this product, it prominently features chip systems such as GPU, FPGA, NPU, and ARM but specifically excludes x86 references. 
• Huawei expects to deliver its first 5G phone in November 2019

​

even more follow on

We attended the Aruba Atmosphere 2019 user conference in Las Vegas.  What we learned was that Aruba had made solid progress since last year’s Atmosphere conference.  It has delivered on 802.11ax, SD-Branch (and SD-WAN), AI/ML, and Zigbee/Bluetooth 5.0, and elements of the IoT market.  The company also introduced a new access point that was not hinted at last year, an 802.11ad outdoor access point.  If we were to sum up the company’s main message for the show, it’s all about SD-Branch.  The company took great efforts to emphasize that its portfolio has greater breadth than ever and is among the few vendors that can deliver all the networking a company may desire.

802.11ax.  At last year’s event, the company told customers to expect 802.11ax products by Nov/Dec of 2018.  Our market share tables show the company shipped 802.11ax for revenue in 4Q18.  At the show, the company also announced some new, full-featured 802.11ax Access Points, the 530 and 550 series.  These new Access Points support Bluetooth 5 and Zigbee, to allow support of IoT devices.  These new 802.11ax Access Points will be available this month, April 2019.​

802.11ad.  The company also introduced a point to point outdoor access point.  The new AP387 allows 1 Gbps at 400 meters using 802.11ad and has a backup of 5 GHz 802.11ac in case of inclement weather.  This device has been shipping for a “couple months” according to the stage presentation (personnel at the show booth said since January 2019).

Machine Learning.  Using Machine Learning for Client Steering and for managing Transient clients. At last year’s Atmosphere event, the company was just rolling out AI/ML to customers to improve networking capabilities for wireless users. 

SD-Branch.  The company disclosed that it has 25,000 SD-Branch “wins,” which means that it has many contracts to sell “at some point in the future” SD-WAN and other branch equipment systems such as WLAN and switching.  At last year’s event, the company had not sold any SD-WAN, so this is a big accomplishment and signifies Aruba’s progress in delivering what it calls a Single Pane of Glass approach that includes four parts:  SD-WAN orchestration, Dynamic Path Steering, Secure Connectivity, and Dynamic Segmentation.

Clearpass Device Insight.  The company introduced its device recognition system, intended to simplify the discovery of IoT devices on the network.  Clearpass Device Insight is available in April 2019.  This cloud service uses a fingerprint database, as well as AI/ML, to find devices on the network, and then presents them by category on a single screen.

During the day-2 presentations, the company had some fun and CTO, Partha Narasimhan, showed a picture of him pretending to be an IT executive of a fictitious university.

Today Intel had a major Data Center event in San Francisco. It was a multi-hour announcement showcasing all the different products Intel is/will be launching.

Some interesting background that Intel talked about was that only 2% of worlds data has been analyzed and a 5G will be a major driver move compute to the edge.   They also touted that over 50% of AI workloads are inference and runs best on Intel (X86).  Noticeably absent at the beginning of the presentation was Intel’s work on training.

We found the most interesting parts of the announcement being that AWS talked about custom versions of Intel’s CPU and a Up to 14X inference improvement from just July 2017 in its XEON processors.  Overall there is a 30% gen/gen improvement in XEON, the biggest jump in 5 years.  While staying at 10NM, Intel is able to continue to squeeze performance gains out of the server.

It is important as we hit the limits of process geometry that everything be accelerated, especially with Intel having a similar view of AI workloads and that’s what we saw with Intel.  New Optane memory, new persistent memory, faster Adapter cards which will lead to more Smart NIC announcements, and a 10nm FPGA.  It was clear at the event that large cloud provers like AWS, Azure, and Tencent are looking at all avenues to increase performance and reduce power consumption via software and hardware advancements.

Some interesting highlights included AWS touting over 100 unique instances that leverage Intel processers with more SAP instances running on AWS than anywhere else and Formula 1 using of 65 years of historic race data to train its models in order to make real-time race predictions.