The last hurdles were removed last weekend, but today it’s official: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is acquiring Juniper Networks. With this acquisition, HPE immediately doubles the size of its network business.
Last weekend, it was announced that HPE and Juniper, on the one hand, and the US government, on the other, had reached a settlement. The Department of Justice dropped its objections to the acquisition on condition that HPE and Juniper were willing to make some concessions. We described these concessions in an article. You can find the link at the bottom of this page.
Today, the decision is final. Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform will officially join HPE Aruba Networking’s network offering under the flag of HPE. The new business unit will be known as HPE Networking. You can see the new logos below.
HPE puts the network first
In a conversation we had last week during HPE Discover 2025 with CEO Antonio Neri, he was clear about the position of the network within HPE. According to him, it is the number one priority. Everything that is currently happening in the world around AI, HPC, and photonics benefits from the best possible network infrastructure. AI in particular is receiving the necessary attention in this regard. Neri sees AI and the network converge. AI is crucial for the best networking experience, and without a good network AI doesn’t perform as well as it can.
With the acquisition of Juniper, HPE believes it can take a major step forward in this area. In addition, Juniper adds all kinds of components to HPE’s portfolio that HPE Aruba Networking does not have, or has to a significantly lesser extent. This is still the case now that HPE must make the source code of Mist AIOps available to a maximum of two licensees. Juniper has an extensive data center (and metro) offering. It also owns Apstra, the management environment for data center infrastructure. Juniper also has a fairly extensive security portfolio in the field of networking.
Together for the Cisco crown
All in all, HPE’s acquisition of Juniper should bring HPE’s vision of offering everything organizations need in hybrid cloud environments another big step closer. The other important take on this acquisition is that HPE is now in a much better position to take on its major competitor Cisco.
HPE will feel strengthened by Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for LAN and WLAN. For the first time in living memory, Cisco has fallen out of the leaders’ section. In our opinion, however, there is room for debate here. It is far from wise for competitors to no longer consider Cisco a leader.
Whatever the exact reality may be, it is clear that the battle between the two big boys, of which Cisco is still by far the largest, is really heating up. There is still some work to be done for HPE. It can’t be 1+1=2, but must be more than that. To achieve this, the two portfolios will inevitably move closer together. Juniper’s growth has been virtually non-existent in recent years, so something has to be done there. The integration needed to realize the added value of HPE’s acquisition of Juniper will take some time.
If HPE succeeds in integrating the companies well, the end result could be quite impressive. Of course, that is not a certainty. Whether it will be enough to knock Cisco off its throne is difficult to say in advance. That also depends on what Cisco does. And last month at Cisco Live, we saw lots of ambition and concrete innovation. It could well be that smaller enterprise players in particular will be pushed further to the margins.
In any case, we will continue to follow developments closely. For more background information on HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks, please click below for some other articles and podcasts: