Aruba Brand Guidelines: Sunnyvale Wi-Fi, HP’s 2015 Purchase & the Orange HPE Kept

Two founders and a Wi-Fi idea after the dot-com bust.

Aruba began in Sunnyvale, California, in 2002, founded by Keerti Melkote and Pankaj Manglik, according to English Wikipedia. The timing was hard. In a profile of Melkote, the Indian business magazine Silicon India described the company starting in the investment “deep-freeze” that followed 9/11, when money was scarce and being bought by a larger company looked like the only route to success. Melkote told the magazine that an acquisition offer arrived a year into the company’s life and that the founders were tempted, but their investors believed the opportunity was bigger; further offers over the next four years were also turned down. Melkote had learned patience, he said, at an earlier start-up, Shasta Networks.

The idea that set Aruba apart was about who, not where. Silicon India wrote that the Wi-Fi systems of the day treated each base station as its own point of connection, which Melkote called “a port-centric approach.” Aruba instead gave each user an identity that the wireless network could authenticate, joining identity-based security to the mobility of Wi-Fi. The magazine described the US Air Force using Aruba access points at its bases, and said winning the military’s acceptance of Wi-Fi had been a long fight because of concerns about security.

The company went public on NASDAQ on 28 March 2007, Silicon India reported, under the ticker ARUN. Melkote told the magazine the ticker was chosen to emphasise the founders’ Indian roots. The magazine described Melkote as co-founder and head of products and partnerships.

From Sunnyvale start-up to HP’s networking banner.

Hewlett-Packard had been in networking long before it met Aruba. English Wikipedia traces the HP division that became ProCurve to Roseville, California, in 1979, and records that HP completed its purchase of 3Com in April 2010 and combined the two as HP Networking. In 2025 the hardware site ServeTheHome recalled that HP’s move into networking had ended a reseller partnership with Cisco, and that HP went on to buy 3Com and Aruba to build that business.

On 2 March 2015 Hewlett-Packard announced that it would buy Aruba Networks, and the deal was completed on 19 May 2015, English Wikipedia says. From 1 November 2015 the company operated as the “Intelligent Edge” business unit of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, covering HPE’s networking and security operations, and HP moved all of its networking business into the Aruba entity. Wikipedia lists the products as network switches, access points, hotspots and wireless controllers, and describes the company today as based in Santa Clara.

The name changed in 2023. The Swiss trade magazine IT Reseller reported on 24 April 2023 that HPE planned to cut its 29 brands to eight over three years, under the umbrella names Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HPE GreenLake. Among the product brands that would stay was HPE Aruba Networking. The magazine quoted a blog post by HPE’s chief marketing officer, Jim Jackson, saying that because of Aruba’s importance HPE would take particular care to bring the brand into its new architecture while keeping its equity, including the typeface and the colour in the new wordmark.

A month later the Japanese business site Mynavi TECH+ reported from an HPE briefing in Tokyo on 25 May 2023. Alan Carpenter, who led global sales for HPE Aruba Networking, said the two brands would be unified, but that Aruba had become established in the market as a networking name and was worth keeping, orange corporate colour included. He described a portfolio of Wi-Fi, switching, SD-WAN, data-centre networking, private 5G and secure access, with the Aruba CX 10000 switch series built around Pensando processors, and planned purchases of Athonet for private 5G and Axis Security for security services.

Racks, ceilings and trade-fair halls.

Networking hardware is mostly bought by people who will never see it in use. Switches sit in locked racks, servers in data-centre aisles, and access points on office ceilings, so the makers rely on a small set of familiar pictures: a rack of switches with rows of lit ports, a white disc fixed to a ceiling tile, a home router with its antennas raised, a long cold aisle of cabinets under strip lighting.

The companies in this group range from makers of home and small-office routers to suppliers of whole data-centre racks, and from long-listed corporations to firms owned through holding companies in Asia. Many design their products in one country and have them built in another, often by contract manufacturers, so what a company says about where its equipment is made is worth reading closely and attributing to the company.

Trade fairs are where much of the industry shows itself. Computex in Taipei, Interop and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona have long been venues for product launches and partner meetings, alongside more specialised events for supercomputing and service providers. Product names do much of the branding work: families of routers, switches and servers carry short names and model numbers that customers learn to read, while the management software that runs them is increasingly sold as a subscription alongside the box.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, where it says its products are made, and any regulatory or legal history reported by dated sources — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Instant On, Juniper and two brands under one unit.

Aruba also sold to small businesses. The German technology blog Deskmodder reported in November 2024 that Instant On, the range of access points and switches Aruba had offered since 2019 for networks that could be set up quickly, had had its app renamed from “Aruba Instant On” to “HPE Networking Instant On” with version 3.1.0, and that the Aruba name would disappear from those products while “Instant On” stayed.

The larger change came with Juniper. HPE announced its purchase of Juniper Networks on 9 January 2024, Network World reported, and the deal went through reviews in the UK, the EU and the US, where the Department of Justice sued to block it in January 2025. A settlement filed on 27 June 2025 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California required the combined company to license the source code of Juniper’s Mist AI software to two winning bidders and to divest HPE’s Instant On wireless networking business, CRN reported.

HPE closed the purchase on 2 July 2025. Network World reported that day that a new HPE Networking business unit, led by the former Juniper chief executive Rami Rahim, would contain the operating units of both HPE Aruba and HPE Juniper, and that the plan was to keep both brands. How the combined range would be arranged was not yet settled at the time of that report.

For a design guide, Aruba shows how an acquired name can keep its colour and typeface inside a much larger company’s brand system. Compare Cisco, whose reseller partnership with HP ended when HP moved into networking, and RUCKUS, another maker of enterprise Wi-Fi access points. For this guide we use an orange, a charcoal and a cable grey with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Aruba’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.