Official: Hewlett Packard Enterprise wants to swallow Juniper Networks in $14B deal Hewlett Packard Enterprise officially announced Tuesday its intent to acquire Juniper Networks in a deal valued at $40 per share, or roughly $14 billion. This comes after rumors of a takeover began to swirl earlier this week. Prior to the whispering, Juniper was cruising along at about $30 a share. That shot up to about $36 …
I have been watching the networking space off and on since about 2003. Juniper tried to buy Extreme way back around that time before deciding to go it alone and make their own switches. I remember their first 10G 1U switch, didn't even run their software they OEM'd some 3rd party platform and put their name on it. They came out with their own stuff of course eventually.
As time went on it seemed they struggled to gain much share outside of their service provider space(basically they were mostly selling to people already buying their routers). Haven't noticed much has changed in that regard, so seems strange to me that HPE would place this kind of a bet with "AI" as a justification. Maybe it's just due to the hype surrounding it, makes it more likely their shareholders approve of the purchase or something.
Juniper certainly has a lot of solid tech though the complexity of their JunOS is pretty crazy to me(same goes for Cisco). I'm sure it makes sense for several use cases though.
As someone who does networking as only a minor part of my role(though through every company I have worked for in the last 20 years my networking expertise was above most everyone else's in the org), Extreme's simplicity and functionality beat everything else on the market(been using them since 1999). Hell I still use network designs I first started with in 2004 because they work so well(such designs wouldn't apply to "AI" workloads but I don't have any of those). Not that Extreme has ever really taken off in the market either, I remember a Foundry Networks rep back in 2004 trying to convince me Extreme was going out of business in the next couple of years.. ironic that it was Extreme who acquired several of the Brocade(Foundry) network assets over a decade later.
HPE seems to have so many different switching platforms under their roof, hopefully they can consolidate the user interfaces at least(pretty radical differences between some of them anyway).
Certainly seems to me if AI networking was a super important thing to HPE they could do a much better job sourcing the same merchant silicon ASICs and making their own high end stuff for a fraction of the money. They obviously have the server/storage(and even networking, Aruba switching is super popular among network engineers(I have never personally tried it)), market penetration already.
Curious for anyone who knows - does HPE have (m)any supercomputers (Cray, etc?) out there running on Juniper network gear? I assume a lot of it is infiniband or something. Curious because I'd expect similar networking requirements for AI.
Looking at Juniper's stock price since the dot com era, I was quite surprised how little it has appeared to move in the past 20 years.
> Looking at Juniper's stock price since the dot com era, I was quite surprised how little it has appeared to move in the past 20 years.
Some very few companies are happy having stable, small amounts of growth and profit with a steady return for shareholders that is sustainable for years and decades without trying to make every quarter record-breaking, and get themselves in the news regardless of whether it's for good or bad reasons, while risking sudden plummets that could make the company at risk of falling apart and being bought out for cheap.
I don't even understand how "AI" can have anything to do with getting packets from point A to point B. It's just algorithms, all it's doing is looking at the traffic to determine if there might be better routes or where there is a problem. It's nothing special. It's not anything new. It's just sticking the latest marketing words on stuff that's been in use for years, like Cloud.
"HPE seems to have so many different switching platforms under their roof, hopefully they can consolidate the user interfaces at least"
There's no chance of that. Comware was on the block 7-8 years ago, and yet go on their site today and you can see their "new" (and recently re-renamed) Comware range. ProVision-based hardware is still sold and recommended on the website even tho that was getting retired 3-4 years ago. Under HPE's tenure another two breeds of switch were invented. Integration on the control plane side has been inexplicably poor - try to determine which of the CX range of switches can be managed in Aruba Central? Who can tell? The only switch range they've properly EOLed is the Aruba MAS, which is probably because the 3 people in the world didn't get upset too much.
HPE has no strategy, leadership or anyone with any gumption or skill in this area, and so it will continue.
Couldn't see anything in the article but Reuters says The transaction is expected to be funded through financing commitments for $14 billion in term loans. In case nobody noticed, we're no longer in a period of zero interest rates, this is going to be very expensive for HPE which will almost have to sell stuff to cover costs because it certainy won't get it from net cashflow.
I have noticed that Juniper's intent-based networking technology, Apstra, getting good reviews in the enterprise space these past couple of years - so no doubt thats a target as this intent-based system has and will incorporate a lot of AI functionality that can be applied to the entire networking, and also server and storage offerings. Also Juniper has a good footprint in Telcos, which would benerfit HPE in that space. Seems expensive, but then so do most things these days.....
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