This one has taken a long time. HPE Announced its Intent to Acquire Juniper around 18 months ago. After settling concerns with the DOJ, the deal finally closed today.
HPE Juniper Deal Closes Ending a Saga
As we went into with the piece around the deal’s announcement, roughly a quarter century ago, Juniper was the big challenge to Cisco’s service provider dominance. Cisco and HP had a big reseller agreement where Cisco would sell HP’s servers and HP would sell Cisco’s networking gear. When HP started its networking business, that immediately ended the Cisco-HP partnership, leading to product lines like Cisco UCS. HP(E) also bought companies like 3Com (2009) and Aruba (2015) to bolster its networking business over the years. With this deal concluding, HPE has managed to build a networking business to rival Cisco in many areas.
I will say that in 2024 I did not see a big antitrust review coming given how many competitors there are in the market. The DOJ settlement involves HPE divesting of its Instant On business. We last reviewed an Instant On switch in 2022 see HPE Aruba Instant On 1960 48G 2XGT 2SFP+ Switch Review JL808A and HPE Aruba Instant On 1960 24G 2XGT 2SFP+ Switch Review JL806A. HPE also needs to license Juniper’s AI Ops for Mist source code as part of the deal. On a call with analysts this morning, Antonio Neri, HPE’s CEO, was quick to point out that those were two relatively minor concessions in the bigger picture of the company’s new combined portfolio. He noted that Instant On was really for the small business part of the SMB segment.
It looks like the product integration roadmap will be something shared at a future date.
Final Words
What is clear is that HPE is going to be well-equipped to go after both the enterprise market as well as the service provider market as this deal has closed. Personally, I am interested to see how much the Aruba Instant On business sells for and who buys it. They have some good products, but that is a fiercely competitive space where differentiation is tough.
The big question will be how much UltraEthernet is able to dislodge NVIDIA’s Mellanox from AI clusters. Right now, Juniper mostly gets to play in areas like firewalls, lower-speed networks, and the North-South network switches where it competes with companies like Arista. NVIDIA has the lucrative East-West networks locked into its Spectrum and Quantum solutions from its Mellanox acquisition. That has led to NVIDIA becoming an enormous networking company.
Looking forward to finally see the Juniper PTX line cards that can print double sided on the roadmap.
Damn shame. I run a good quantity of Juniper’s QFX and EX switches, and really like them. Best I can hope for is that HPE leaves them alone instead of following the Aruba model.