CIO Influence Interview with Stuart Strickland, Wireless Chief Technology Officer, HPE Aruba Networking

Stuart Strickland, Wireless Chief Technology Officer, HPE Aruba Networking shares tips on leveraging AI to enhance wireless connectivity, challenges around wireless technology, and more about Wi-Fi and cellular technologies in this Interview:

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Hi Stuart, your career spans leading roles. How has your journey shaped your vision for wireless innovation, and what excites you the most about your current role?

Leaving aside for the moment my earlier academic career, I have indeed served in a lot of different roles, including software engineering, managing engineering teams, business development, product management, leading business units, and now, of course, in my current role as wireless CTO.  Before I joined HPE, almost all of that experience had been in the RF semiconductor industry.  That’s where all of these technologies emerge and, from that perspective, I definitely developed a vision for how I thought these technologies should develop.  But I also often felt that I was pushing on a string.  What I enjoy most about my current role is closely linked to the place HPE occupies in our industry.  From this vantage point, I have direct conversations with our customers who run real networks on the ground, but also still guide priorities of our technology suppliers.  I also very much appreciate the unique composition and remarkable talents of my team, who lead our work in standards bodies, drive global regulatory policy, run a state-of-the-art wireless lab, incubate new product and feature candidates, and keep all of this aligned with our customers’ ambitions and challenges in the field.  Together, we are in an ideal position to see what our customers need, put all the pieces together to make it possible, and deliver commercially viable options to our product and engineering teams.  Although my team does not own the plan of record, we are in an ideal position to shape the future.

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How is HPE leveraging AI to enhance wireless connectivity, optimize network performance, and address security challenges?

Most of HPE’s fundamental research and creative development of AI goes on elsewhere in the company.  My team is mostly a consumer of those capabilities.  But the objectives of AI are closely aligned with our ambitions to make wireless networks easier to deploy, easier to manage, easier to scale, more responsive to environmental changes and more resilient to threats.  New tools are helping us to do all of this more effectively, but they haven’t fundamentally changed our mission.

What are the top challenges enterprises face when adopting new wireless technologies, and how does HPE Aruba Networking address these?

If you mean genuinely new wireless technologies and not just generational or incremental advances on technologies that are already familiar, I would say the biggest challenge is understanding what the new technologies are supposed to accomplish, deciding whether to believe they will work, and then figuring out how to manage them.  I hear at least a three or four pitches a month from companies that want to introduce a new radio technology to the enterprise market.  It’s no exaggeration to say that most of these are solutions in search of a problem.  My team acts as a kind of filter, smelter, and foundry.  We use our understanding of enterprise needs to help advocates of these emerging technologies root themselves more firmly in the real world.  And, when we see something that could be genuinely useful, we figure out how to forge it into something our customers can appreciate and readily consume.

With increasing convergence between Wi-Fi and cellular technologies, how do you envision the balance between Wi-Fi 7, 5G, and their respective roles in enterprise environments?

The introduction of private cellular into enterprise networks is a good example of how we address your previous question.  We’ve been working on 5G in the background for a long time.  While Wi-Fi remains the most cost effective basis for wireless communication, delivering the highest capacity for the widest range of applications, there are specific cases where augmenting it with 5G can bring benefits.  For example, we have identified customer needs around wider area outdoor coverage, segregation of public access from back-of-house communication, low-latency applications, and challenging RF environments where a private 5G network can deliver clear advantages.  But, if this technology is going to be successful, it has to be delivered on a model consistent with how enterprises manage their existing networks.  So far, private cellular networks have not only failed to displace Wi-Fi. They’ve also failed to make any significant impact on the private enterprise networking market.  That’s because they have remained a solution in search of a problem and had yet to endure a process of deep integration.

What emerging wireless technologies or trends do you believe have the potential to disrupt the industry in the coming decade?

Everything we look at has disruptive potential.  But let me just focus on one overarching development: Shared spectrum.  This prediction doesn’t require clairvoyance because we have in fact been working on it for a very long time, but its impact is only just beginning to be felt.  Spectrum is a physically limited resource in the face of unlimited appetites for exchanging data.  Historically, spectrum was either licensed for the exclusive use of one entity, such as a mobile network operator, or open for all, on the model of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  With the spectrum sharing mechanisms adopted to provide access to the 3.5 GHz band for private cellular in the U.S. and to the 6 GHz band for many uses globally, we have begun to clear a path out of these binary constraints.  There’s a lot more innovation required to make this work as well as it needs to, but it’s the only way forward.

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On a Lighter Note:

If you hadn’t pursued a career in wireless technologies, what field or passion would you have explored instead?

That’s a question I can answer without having to speculate since wireless technology is actually my second vocation.  I trained and worked as a professional historian of science and technology long before deciding to shine my light in the other direction.  That experience still shapes a lot of how I think and talk about technology.

Looking back at your career, is there a specific innovation or project you’ve worked on that holds a special place in your heart?

Early in my career as a technologist, I worked to get the first GPS receivers adopted in mobile phones.  From the outset, it was clear that this would not work well indoors, so I spent the next long while at various companies trying to solve that problem.  I became convinced that we needed to have reference points, like the GPS constellation, but indoors, and that Wi-Fi access points were the obvious candidates.  But you can’t orient yourself around a reference point if you don’t know where it is and no one knew with any degree of confidence or consistency where these Wi-Fi access points were located.  So the accomplishment that holds a special place in my heart is the work I’ve done with my colleagues at HPE, culminating in the introduction of our Wi-Fi 6E products, to automatically determine and broadcast the locations of all our indoor and outdoor access points.  The client ecosystem still has to catch up, but that’s a twenty-some-odd-year journey I feel is now finally complete.

Thank you, Stuart, for sharing your insights with us.

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