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.

Fast-growing Ethernet Switch vendor Arista Networks announced plans to acquire Mojo Networks, an Enterprise-class WLAN vendor today.  The deal is expected to close in C3Q18.  This deal douses hopes that Arista may buy other WLAN vendors, in our view.  Mojo Networks is unique in the WLAN industry: (a) it has a different business model from competitors, and (b) as of Aug 2018, it manages more Enterprise-class Access Points using Artificial Intelligence than other vendors.  Arista says that it plans to use Mojo AI in its Cognitive Cloud Networking for Campus initiative.  

Mojo Networks has taken revenue for cloud-managed services and has not taken revenue from the sale of Access Points.  The Access Points are sold by distributors who make a small margin and drop ship them to Mojo Networks customers.  The Mojo Networks revenue from cloud-managed services is significant when compared to other vendors in the Enterprise-class WLAN market.  Additionally, because Mojo's Access Point selling partners charge only a small premium for the hardware, Mojo customers benefit with a lower total cost for the Access Points, than, say, Cisco or HPE Aruba Access Points.

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Keynotes at the NFV World & Zero-Touch Congress in San Jose, California were very interesting today.  We share our observations and view of the main themes from these interesting presentations by Nokia, NEC/Netcracker, Google, CenturyTel.  The main theme of these presentations, we think, is this:  NFV/SDN is now deeply in the deployment and commercial phase, where compared to 3-4 years ago, it was just a concept.  

Nokia.  The company announced that its Airframe server platform, which is an OCP based design, comes available with either embedded acceleration or pluggable acceleration.  This comment includes its software acceleration.  The company explained that its Reefshark chipset can be equipped on the Airframe server and can perform better than a non-accelerated server:

• Layer 1 and 2 offloading - 100% better
• Content acceleration - 30x better
• Machine Learning / video recognition - 10x better
• Crypto acceleration

In explaining functions that an Airframe with Reefshark can perform, the company gave a good example: massive MIMO beamforming can be assisted by the machine learning capabilities.  

NEC/Netcracker.  Enrique Gracia presented several uses cases of the NEC/Netcracker customers that related to NFV/SDN.  He explained that 16 customers have deployed one or more of these uses cases.

Full Stack OSS/BSS/MANO.  A customer deployed this system in 12 weeks to launch a VNF.  The system managed both physical and virtual devices.

Expand to a new territory using VNFs from home region.  A customer now delivers services to a customer outside the home territory by deploying the software and service from the network location at the home location.  In this particular case, NEC/Netcracker and its customer do revenue sharing and VNFs include SD-WAN, virtual firewall and others.  The service provider is expected to expand its customer addressable base by 40%, mainly targeting small/medium businesses in this non-home region.  This system uses MANO, OSS, BSS and the marketplace.  The company says in this case, time to revenue is expected to take 50% less time to deploy new VNFs in the future.

uCPE (Universal Customer Premises Equipment) deployment instead of branded hardware.  The company worked with a service provider company to enable uCPE to be deployed as an alternative to Cisco, Juniper and others' gear. 

Google Cloud.  Vijoy Pandey, who represented Google Cloud, presented on the topic of using AI/ML to reconfigure its data center system.  The company's cloud data center architecture has been evolving continuously since it was first introduced.  Currently, the company is using its own AI/ML system to learn from current network traffic patterns in order to design its future network architecture.  

CenturyTel.  The company has deployed Broadcom based Ethernet switches using its own Network OS.  These switches do their own packet forwarding.  Additionally, the company has built its own orchestration system called VICTOR.  It draws upon Ansible, NetCONF, uses the service logic interpreter from ONAP and uses parts of Open Daylight.  The company plans to open source this development and the spokesperson Adam Dunstan said, perhaps jokingly, that this might be called ONAP-lite.

​The main theme of the the Huawei HAS 2018 meeting keynotes was Artificial Intelligence and, secondarily, nearly ubiquitous networks connections across the world.  Huawei expects 86% of enterprises to have experimented with AI by 2025 (<5% in 2018).  It is leveraging AI across nearly all its products and will offer a full stack AI solution to all Huawei partners at its @Huawei Connect 2018 conference (Oct 10, 2018).

More specifcially, Huawei is using AI to elevate products & solutions to new levels: cloud, networks, devices, EI, SoftCOM AI, and Intelligent phones.  The company's strategy has changed over time and is now AI-focused:

2006-2011: Single strategy: All IP
2012-2017: SoftCOM: All Cloud
2017+:     All Intelligence: SoftCom AI (autonomous networks / services 2.0) - this reduces operating and maintence costs

The company expects that networks will be 10x more efficient in the operation of equipment as a result of AI.  

By 2025, Huawei expects 440M AR/VR users, 40% of cars to be 'connected," 80% of users with access to mobile broadband, usage of 1 Gbps / user / day (versus .03 in 2018) and 20B connected devices worldwide.


Connected Devices Forecast (Huawei) by 2025: 40B sensors and 100B connections.  This thinking is based on data including that there are: 

• 4B livestock in the world
• 300m streetlights
• 1.8B utility meters
• numerous bike programs in major cities
• numerous greenhouses

The company's product lines are very diverse; to wit, the company introduced a helmet for the blind, which will be available soon.  

Huawei expects NB-IoT (LTE-based IoT capability) to reach almost full coverage in China in 2018.  Additionally, the company expects NB-IoT to reach 100 networks by the end of 2018 (versus 39 in 2017) and to be available on 1.2M base stations (from 0.5M in 2017) and to be connected to 150M connections (versus 10M in 2017).  

The company boasted about several developments:

1. Chipsets for cloud data center systems.  The company highlighted its internally developed Atlas (intelligent cloud hardware).
2. The company expects its cloud services will become one of major 5 clouds.  Uses smart NICs for CPU optimization and is 'open.'
3. The cloud service from Huawei will be low cost because Huawei makes all the equipment necessary to build this cloud
4. Internet of Vehicles system was was built for Group PSA (French auto company known for the Peugot brand)
5. 5-An example of the company's "Intent-Driven Network" was its AI-based premium home broadband for a better user experience on Chinese based PON systems in use today.  Real time data collections allows 40% reduction on door-to-door service and fault prediction of 85% of Wi-Fi faults and 30% of all network faults.
6. AI-enabled, software-defined cameras are now available that perform low-light feature extraction (e.g. facial detection/comparison) over 85% of the time.  And, using the Huawei AI chip, it can outperform CPUs by 25X and GPUs by over 6x.
7. VR/AR will create a $2.7 trillion ecosystem in the future.  The company reminds the audience that it demonstrated teh first CloudVR Proof of Concept at the March 2018 MWC conference.

Q&A after keynote:
Mr. Eric Xu, Rotating Deputy Chairman of Huawei dodged several important questions relating to trade tariffs, cloud business unit revenue targets, growth rates of each major business units, specifics about AI full-stack claims made during the keynote, and instead focused generally on the AI theme.  Xu did, however, however, answer a handful of questions that were quite interesting:  Huawei won't acquire DRAM, Flash companies; and that 5G is not so revolutionary - it is just an evolution following LTE. Additionally, Xu mentioned that in 2H18, Huawei will launch end to end 5G solutions  and by 3Q19, it will launch 5G capable phones.  Xu said Huawei will continue to work with Intel on x86 for the foreseeable future.

More Q&A specifics:
Trade Tariffs and ZTE.  (In a moment of levity, however, Eric Xu smiled when the words ZTE were mentioned - recall that a day earlier, ZTE was penalized by the US).  We will focus on our customers and will ultimately survive. 

Cloud 1.5B by 2020, will you hit the target?  Will offer cloud services to telco service providers.  Huawei smartphones will leverage the Huawei cloud.  Enterprise customers will consume cloud services such as video, computing.  In future, trend will be enterprises will move to hybrid cloud and public cloud will take a major share.  Huawei cloud provides compute/storage/networking to enterprises and government.  200K x86 servers in Huawei cloud.  Revenue with external customers - won't share it with you - maybe .  

AI chipset question:  We don't position chipset as a standalone business - won't sell to external customers.  Will be used to differentiate Huawei products.  Smartphone - we use multi-vendor strategy always; in other worlds; have multiple Qualcomm, NTK and others.  Remain committed to multi-vendor strategy.  Don't want vendor lock-in, however.  If we only have one vendor, what might happen to our smartphone business, Xu asked.  

Enteprise business growth? Declined to comment on specifics, but said he encourages each to grow rapidly.  

How do customers get to 86% AI usage (the question was asked by an audience member by incorrectly referring to the statistic that was made during the keynote - specifically, Huawei said AI experimentation will be 86%, not AI usage)?  Will give clearer answer at Huawei Connect 2018.  For now, can share that we will use AI on ourselves first, then help customers on various functions such as finance, human resources, networks, etc.  

Supply chain - will you acqire your suppliers?  We do joint innovation with suppliers to meet Huawei's needs; push multi-source strategy, however.  Will not invest in DRAM, display, flash.

5G wasn't mentioned much in the presentation, why?  We don't have as high expectations as some others; 5G is just one of many products we offer and is just a natural evolution from 4G.  You don't have a fundamental difference between 4G and 5G - consumers just see faster speed and lower latency.  LTE already support autonomous driving.  Past couple years, governments have regarded 5G as too important.  June 2018, will only address eMBB - faster speeds.  2019 - will have fully 5G compliant system that does low latency.  4G is pretty robust; we don't see 5G as a national coverage network - it'll just focus on city centers.  However, once one carrier announces 5G, then all others must.  50% of Chinese have wireless connection capable of 4K but there are still no 4K stations.

2H18, end to end 5G solutions available.  3Q19, will launch 5G capable phones.

Share trends for Huawei at operators.  Revenue growth of telecom services is a challenging topic.  This revenue growth topic is why titan operators express concern about moving to 5G; instead, Huawei thinks moving to improved intelligence will assist operators.  Video will become more and more important as telcos become media companies too.  

Will AI become a privacy concern?  Any technology has double-sided effects.  With AI, some believe it can be dangerous.  Xu believes in the wisdom of man.  Look back to history of mankind, and our humanity can do same for mankind.

Will Huawei find alternate suppliers for data center products?  (Xu also smiled about this question before answering).  Today, Intel is dominant player.  Our point of view, we look forward to more diversified landscape; but we work with Intel mainly now.

There were 3,100 attendees at the Atmosphere show in Las Vegas, most of which appeared in attendance at the keynote.  Artificial Intelligence and Cloud were the main topics.  Specifically new for the show:  cloud-managed SD-WAN, NetInsight, ArubaEdge Partner program, Cape Networks acquisition.  Cloud-managed SD-WAN – June/July ’18 availability (dynamic path selection, VPC direct to AWS or Azure).  NetInsight is a data-collecting and cloud-analysis AI platform that finds anomalies and allows improvements to wireless LAN operation.  Cape Networks acquisition to allow user-experience simulation for cloud-services connection quality measurement. 

Keerti Melkote, President of Aruba, discussed financials: FY17 was up 15% Y/Y, reaching $2.5B, split 49% to wired and 51% to wireless.  (650 note: for C17, we measure WLAN + non Data Center Switch + Enhanced NAC product revenues at $2,260M).

A key message of the presentation was that as enterprises embrace cloud-services applications like dropbox, Salesforce and Office 365, this means enterprises become more focused on edge access than ever.  Citing statistics like that 80% of advanced attacks  use valid credentials, 8 weeks average gestation period of typical attacks, and 84% of those who’ve deployed IoT have been breached, the company said that securing the edge is more important than ever and discussed the Aruba 360 Secure Fabric. 

​Aruba had customers on stage to endorse various products, including Accenture, Ohio State University, and CBRE.  Other customers mentioned on slides included Lufthansa Technik, Purdue University, Rajasthan, Disney, Time Warner, University of Minnesota, University of New Hampshire, University at Buffalo, Northwestern University, University of Washington, Bucks, Virginia Tech, University of Iowa, Illinois, and Lenovo.  

Nokia was bullish on its technology developments and cautious on telco capex.  CEO Rajeev Suri described the telecom market as having tough market conditions and expects telco equipment market revenues down in 2018.  He said the Swedish competitor pricing aggressively and that it will be difficult to keep share in China with 5G ramp.  He said Nokia is executing on plan to grow non telco verticals – and it will take 3+ years before it is sizable enough to potentially offset telco challenges.  He emphasized a key strength is its focus on cost reductions.  He highlighted success in cable MSO market and that its FP4-based router will ship in a few days.  Suri thinks 5G could roll out in China first, maybe tied with US.  Nokia CEO's comments were quite similar about 5G rollout timing expectations compared to comments made at Huawei’s recent conference (2019 initial deployments; chipsets 2019; broadening deployments in 2020).

Some more details from Rajeev Suri's presentation:
Ericsson.  We were surprised that the CEO of Nokia took the opportunity to take some digs at Ericsson.  He said that Ericsson is pricing aggressively; it also shared some quantitative statistics about competitive take-outs of Ericsson installed base. He argued that it has broadest portfolio in industry (fixed, software are examples).  

China.  Two interesting comments about China – a) will be difficult to maintain share in China as 5G rolls out, b) China might be first to deploy 5G.  
Emphasized that Amazon Web Services is making a presentation at this conference.  Said its new FP4-based routers are more efficient than any competitor and will be so for at least the next year.

Other presenters made comments about 5G mainly.  Here are some interesting comments:
Artificial Intelligence.  The company has a lot of network automation technology that is it working on but would not share details about this technology.  We guess Nokia is more open with its customers and that it'll make announcements at MWC '18 in Barcelona.
5G Radio.  Beamforming is a key technology that will be highlighted in 5G.  Also, the company's separation of Stage 1 and Stage 2 MIMO processing makes the bandwidth needs from baseband to array be much less than competitors.  Additionally, the company explains that its expected systems will have dramatically higher efficiency than competitors - again, the company kept its secrets here under wraps.  Late 2018 will see first 5G deployments, going into 2019.
IP/Optical.  Basil Alwan, President IP/Optical division said the first FP4-based product went to production end of the last week.  Major customers will take shipment before the end of this quarter.  The company will ship its 57 Terabit router during 1Q18.  SD-WAN will replace MPLS VPNs over time, perhaps at a rapid pace.  

Service Provider presentations:
Amazon Web Services IoT.  Satyam Yadav, GM of AWS IoT made a presentation at this meeting.  The presentation focused on how Amazon's IoT software and its services would be used in a partnership with Nokia to deliver Amazon IoT services.  
Sprint.  Ron Marquardt, CTO.  He is not sure how much customers might pay for lower-latency connections available from 5G.  Now that the uncertainty of the T-Mobile US acquisition is beyond us, Sprint says it is rapidly focusing on spending to upgrade its network.  Sprint also said it plans to deal with fewer vendors in the future.
Elisa. The Finnish operator presented data about its extraordinary data traffic growth and its per-subscriber data usage being far above competitors as well as other service providers in the world. 
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