For access points that manage both Aruba Central and Juniper Mist, the rollout is scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.
HPE had set this deadline in December, during Discover Barcelona. It ultimately delivered a few weeks ahead of schedule. Its first product, tri-band, is aimed at hotel environments and small agencies or offices. It sits within the Aruba portfolio, in a line that includes two other APs.
Application Experience Predictor: a touch of Mist in Aruba Central
At Discover, HPE outlined additional convergences between Aruba and Juniper. It had promised to integrate Mist’s Large Experience Model (LEM) into Aruba Central. This model combines telemetry and digital twins to improve the user experience of collaborative applications. HPE has indeed integrated it, calling the feature the Application Experience Predictor.
Another promise: to inject into Mist the Aruba Central feature that surfaces insights at the organizational level. The integration is currently in beta.
Rami Rahim, head of HPE Networking, has long signaled that between the two platforms, the difference will ultimately rest only in the deployment model (cloud for Mist, VPC for Aruba Central). The microservices architecture facilitates the junctions.
If convergence is underway on access points, implementing it on switches is another story. The CX line, which runs an OS derived from Linux, could provide a good entry point, as opposed to hardware that uses Comware.
