At Roc, we believe this news will be revolutionary for the market – disrupting the traditional product-led vendor monopoly through accelerating innovation and providing a more responsive service to customers. And in the end, our hope is that this will drive innovation across the market, levelling up the offering across all networking vendors and driving competition for the benefit of end users.
Here’s why.
In January 2024, HPE entered an agreement to acquire Juniper Networks for an estimated $14billion. Whilst the deal was approved by the boards of directors and shareholders, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) issued a lawsuit challenging the acquisition which was resolved at the end of June 2025.
As part of the resolution, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business and, after close, facilitate limited access to Juniper’s Mist AIOps technology.
The deal doubles HPE’s networking business, blending Juniper’s expertise in enterprise, data centre, telecom and AI-native networks with HPE’s existing portfolio. Juniper’s former CEO, Rami Rahim, will lead the merged networking division helping define a cohesive strategy. According to HPE, networking customers will benefit from HPE innovation across its full portfolio offering to accelerate and simplify their AI transformations.
In short, based on the facts, it doesn’t. All existing HPE and newly acquired Juniper products will honour their product lifecycle commitments and support agreements.
As part of the DoJ agreement, HPE are required to license Juniper’s Mist technology – opening up the opportunity for customers of other networking vendors to take advantage of AIOps and analytics, how realistic this will be integration and pricing wise remains to be seen. This is in line with HPE’s ambition around Greenlake, though, which is adopting vendor agnotism more aggressively to become an end to end observability, analytics, and management platform. Combined with Mist, we could see a rapid advancement of HPE Networking as a management overlay against a backdrop of mixed networking, infrastructure, and cloud estates – a real advantage to customers who cannot afford a major product investment, or the disruption of a continuous transformation.
This acquisition will, in the long term, provide significant benefits to current and future HPE Networking customers and partners, with leadership from Antonio Negeri (HPE CEO) and Rami Rahim (GM for HPE Networking, previously CEO of Juniper Networks), Roc’s expectations are that the key benefits and focus will be:
Having discussed the acquisition in detail with both Aruba and Juniper teams, we are confident disruption will be low, if at all, with the main changes likely to be around relationship management, customer and partner ownership, and technical support (primarily, knowledge sharing and deepened understanding of both technology stacks and integration capabilities). Roc suspect additional focus on the value Managed Service Providers, such as ourselves, can provide to support customers through any changes, disruption, and integration.
At Roc, as both a Juniper Elite Plus and HPE Aruba Gold partner, we are ideally placed to work with you to provide:
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Chelsea Chamberlin leads Roc’s Solution and Technology strategy, ensuring continual innovation and focussed partnerships which drive outcome based value for our customers. Chelsea’s background includes designing and delivering software and networking solutions within mission critical environments. Outside of work she is a green belt in Kick-boxing and mentor to young women paving careers in tech.