This morning, HPE closed on the Juniper deal, following the surprise announcement over the weekend that HPE had settled with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) right before the planned trial was to begin. HPE CEO Antonio Neri and former Juniper CEO Rami Rahim held a call with press and industry analysts. We asked the two the obvious question: “How will you merge the products?” Others asked similar and related questions, and while details were scant, the general messages that Mr. Neri and Mr. Rahim shared were: (a) no customer will be left behind, and (b) we have a lot of work to do, but we are excited about the opportunity. Responding to questions about how HPE will execute on the terms of the DOJ settlement, the executives explained that the Instant On revenues are “very small” and that there will be an auction of the Juniper/Mist AI Ops code and license. HPE will offer ongoing support to the winning bidder. The team further explained that it is only the AI Ops part of Juniper/Mist that is involved, not the entire software stack associated with Mist. As for branding (see the picture below), the new leader of the HPE Networking division, Rami Rahim, will lead two separate brands, which will carry forward to various products in the portfolio: HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Juniper Networking. Except for the DOJ settlement-related details, the team shared roughly the same messages about its merger plans that it did over a year ago when the deal was announced almost 1-1/2 years ago.
As for what this acquisition does for the HPE’s competitiveness, on a proforma basis, HPE is now a participant in several new categories, including Next Generation Firewall and Service Provider Routing, and has a larger presence in several others, including Enterprise-class Wireless LAN (WLAN), Campus Ethernet Switching, Data Center Ethernet Switching, Enhanced Network Access Control (ENAC), SSE/SASE and SD-WAN. Given that the deal closed on July 2, 2025 – very close to the beginning of calendar 3Q25 – we will be reflecting combined market share statistics in our 3Q25 reports for NGFW, SP Routing, WLAN, Data Center Ethernet Switch categories (and associated programs), Campus Ethernet Switching, AI Networking, Cloud Networking, Network As A Service (NaaS), ENAC, SSE and SASE and SD-WAN.