HPE has confirmed an agreement to acquire Juniper Networks. For one Juniper share, HPE will pay $40 (about €36.60). The total acquisition price comes to about 12.8 billion euros.
It already leaked on Tuesday that HPE was in advanced talks about acquiring Juniper. Now that the parties have reached a detailed agreement, they also announce the acquisition. “HPE’s acquisition of Juniper represents an important inflection point in the industry and will change the dynamics in the networking market and provide customers and partners with a new alternative that meets their toughest demands,” reads the first public comment from HPE CEO Antonio Neri.
Future
HPE expresses the expectation that it will double its networking business with the acquisition. The company already has Aruba; with Juniper it will add another significant networking vendor. The combination should, therefore, strengthen HPE’s current edge-to-cloud strategy. The combined business will provide companies of all sizes with “a complete, secure portfolio that enables the networking architecture necessary to manage and simplify their expanding and increasingly complex connectivity needs.” In this, HPE sees a particular role for artificial intelligence, which Juniper possesses with Mist AI.
In a separate analysis, we describe what makes Juniper interesting to HPE. In it, we also cover Mist AI—more on that in our separate article.
Juniper’s current CEO, Rami Rahim, will oversee HPE’s combined networking business. He will work closely with Neri. Exactly what will happen to the positioning of Juniper and Aruba over time is not entirely clear to us based on the announcement. However, the networking activities of the two brands are quite different.
The acquisition still needs regulatory approval. HPE expects the acquisition to be completed in late 2024 or early 2025.
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