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The news broke over last weekend and now it’s official, HPE is going to acquire Juniper Networks in an all-cash $14B deal. This is the largest acquisition HPE has made since it split up with HP and ventured out on its own.
In recent years, HPE has focused on narrowing down its product portfolio and building up the GreenLake brand. Personally, I’ve never thought much of HP’s networking products. They were… fine. It was very common to find Cisco networking gear alongside HPE’s storage and compute products as part of a complete package, but that started to shift with the acquisition of Aruba networks in 2015 and Plexxi in 2018.
They still didn’t have a robust story when it comes to datacenter and service provider networking, so grabbing Juniper makes a LOT of sense. Juniper has also been developing their Mist AI features over the last eight years, which has placed them far and ahead of other networking vendors, who didn’t get their AI program in gear till 2023.
HPE will now have the credibility to sell solid datacenter gear and a robust AI service they can expand to encompass the rest of their GreenLake offerings. How does Aruba fit into all this? That’s a story for another time, but I suspect they are not feeling entirely zen about the situation.