Aruba Networks, Inc.

Aruba Networks, Inc., now marketed as HPE Aruba Networking, is a networking company founded in February 2002 in Sunnyvale, California, by Keerti Melkote and Pankaj Manglik. It is headquartered in the San Jose / Santa Clara, California area. Aruba was public on NASDAQ (ticker ARUN) until Hewlett-Packard announced its acquisition in March 2015 for roughly $2.7–3 billion; the deal closed in May 2015, and Aruba now operates as the "Intelligent Edge" networking business unit and subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE). Standalone financials are no longer broken out; press reports put Aruba's revenue at about $729 million in its last full fiscal year before acquisition and roughly 700 Bay Area employees at that time.

Aruba supplies enterprise campus and branch networking: Wi-Fi access points, wireless controllers, gateways, Ethernet switches, and SD-WAN (expanded through HPE's 2020 acquisition of Silver Peak). It also sells cloud management and AI-driven operations software (Aruba Central, Aruba ESP), network access control, and location services, and offers network-as-a-service through HPE GreenLake. Customers are primarily enterprises, schools, healthcare, and government agencies.

Litigation posture: Aruba appears in the tracked data in just two matters — one as defendant and one as plaintiff — both arising from the same dispute. This is the profile of an operating company defending against a patent assertion, not a serial litigant or an NPE. The counterparty, XR Communications, LLC d/b/a Vivato Technologies, is a non-practicing entity: defendants in the related litigation stated in court filings that XR does not make or sell products and instead asserts patents originally held by Vivato, Inc., a failed Wi-Fi equipment startup.

Notable cases: XR Communications, LLC v. Aruba Networks, Inc., No. 2:17-cv-02945 (C.D. Cal., filed April 19, 2017), was one of roughly ten parallel suits against Wi-Fi equipment vendors, consolidated before Judge Andrew Guilford into lead case No. 8:17-cv-00596. The patents-in-suit (e.g., U.S. 6,611,231; 7,062,296; 7,397,728) concern beamforming and multi-user MIMO; the accused product included the Aruba AP-325. Aruba also filed an inter partes review, IPR2018-00725, at the PTAB on March 1, 2018. The asserted claims were ultimately held invalid as indefinite, and the Federal Circuit affirmed in May 2023. Venue was the Central District of California, not the Eastern District of Texas.