Aruba Networks went public months before the first iPhone, just as companies were deciding that wireless would be how people connected at work. Its access points and central controllers let a university, hospital or corporate campus run thousands of wireless connections securely from one place. Laptops had already made Wi-Fi a must. Hospitals, schools and offices were among its early customers.

Brains in the Controller

Keerti Melkote and Pankaj Manglik founded Aruba in 2002. Their bet was that enterprise Wi-Fi needed central management and security. Scattered standalone access points would not do. Aruba put the intelligence in a central controller, which made large networks easier to secure and manage. It competed directly with Cisco, which dominated networking. It won customers that needed large, mobile and secure wireless networks.

HP Keeps the Name

Aruba priced its IPO at $11 a share in March 2007 on the Nasdaq. Smartphones and tablets soon flooded offices and campuses, and demand for its gear grew. By 2015 Aruba had become a leading rival to Cisco in enterprise wireless. That year Hewlett-Packard bought Aruba for about $3 billion. The Aruba name lived on as HP's networking brand, and it remains at the center of HP's networking business.

Cover: The Water Fan, Winslow Homer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a tropical island scene (Aruba).