HPE Escapes the Frying Pan, but How Big a Fire Is the DOJ Requirement That It License Juniper’s Mist AI Source Code to the Competition?

On July 2, 2025 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) confirmed that its US$14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, first announced back in January 2024, had finally been approved by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). This puts an end to months of uncertainty over the fate of the deal, allowing both companies to exit their prolonged state of limbo and begin to make solid plans for their future as one combined entity. It also means that current customers of both companies, alongside future customers of the post-merger entity, will finally get some clarity as to how Juniper’s integration into HPE will be handled. This was outlined in a joint press conference by HPE Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Antonio Neri and Juniper CEO Rami Rahim that was hastily organized following the reveal of the news. The new structure will see the Juniper CEO assume the head of both HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Juniper Networking, which will exist simultaneously as separate product lines within HPE, with the goal of ultimately combining the two at an unspecified date in the future. Further details on the future merger are light, although it was confirmed that each company’s respective channel partner networks would be united in the near term.

The closure of the DOJ case against HPE represents the closing of one chapter of the Juniper acquisition, but the next chapter is shaping up to be even more challenging, due not only to the challenges surrounding the integration of Juniper into HPE, but also the onerous DOJ terms that HPE had to accept for the deal to pass. The most shocking of these, by far, is that HPE must license the Juniper Mist AI Ops source code, one of the most valuable assets that HPE was set to gain from the acquisition, to at least two competitors. HPE must also divest and sell its Small and Medium Business (SMB)-focused Instant On division, although this will be significantly less disruptive given that the product line was relatively new and hadn’t yet gained significant traction in the market. This ABI Insight reflects upon HPE’s previous acquisitions in an attempt to understand HPE’s plans with Juniper, and assesses the potential implications of the DOJ’s terms concerning HPE.

Acquisitions have formed a central pillar of HPE’s corporate strategy over the past several decades, with the company viewing takeovers as a means to achieve a diverse range of goals. The most common of these goals is obtaining complementary technologies that can be integrated into HPE’s broader portfolio. Examples of this strategy in action include the purchase of Colubris Networks back in 2008, through which HPE first gained its Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) capabilities, and the acquisition of Italian private cellular technology provider Athonet in 2023, which HPE undertook with the goal of enhancing its converged WLAN/5G solutions. Another key driver behind HPE takeovers has been the facilitation of expansion into new markets. Perhaps most pertinent here is the US$2.7 billion purchase of 3Com in 2010, with the assumption being that HPE could leverage 3Com’s Chinese subsidiary (at the time, the source of over half of 3Com’s sales) to access the then-booming Chinese market. HPE has also turned to buyouts as a form of mass talent poaching. In the case of HPE’s acquisition of Aruba for ~US$3 billion in 2015, the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 30% that Aruba experienced in the preceding 5 years, alongside its rapid product innovation and fast expanding market clout, no doubt convinced HPE that it was an exceptionally well-managed company, and so after acquiring the company, HPE made few internal staff changes. Notably, Aruba CEO at the time of the purchase, Dominic Orr, continued for another 2 years following HPE’s acquisition, after which Aruba founder and previous Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Keerti Melkote, assumed the role for 4 years.

While the above examples point to the various motivations behind HPE’s pursuit of acquisitions, they also highlight the challenges HPE has faced in execution, in assimilating external resources and staff, and in forming a new coherent identity following the takeovers. With Colubris Networks, a disruptive and drawn-out integration led to the departure of much of the original talent behind the creation of Colubris. Again, HPE’s widespread restructuring of 3Com’s Chinese subsidiary led to strained industrial relations and issues with staff churn, leading to a sharp drop in H3C’s sales in Mainland China. Unable to realize the success in Mainland China that it sought, HPE decided to sell a 51% stake in H3C to Tsiunghua Unigroup in 2015, and ultimately offloaded the remaining 49% to the same group in 2023. In the case of the Aruba takeover, the existence of HPE’s original customer base alongside Aruba’s meant that HPE had to maintain two distinct product lines for many years, fracturing its portfolio and creating additional confusion for both existing and prospective customers. The frequency of the takeovers and integrations has also necessitated multiple restructurings and rebranding’s of HPE’s networking division to enable it to deliver to consumers the benefits of the acquisition, and also to differentiate the new entity from the old one. Originally called HP ProCurve, HPE’s networking unit was renamed HP Networking in 2010 after the 3Com acquisition, and in 2015 following the Aruba acquisition, the networking division assumed the Aruba Networks brand name. In 2023, the new HPE Aruba Networking brand was introduced, but this will now exist simultaneously with the HPE Juniper Networking brand.

Through the acquisition of Juniper Networks, the largest in HPE’s history, the company appears to be attempting to achieve multiple goals simultaneously. First, there is the goal of gaining competitive innovative technologies, most notably Juniper’s Mist Platform, which is founded on a microservices cloud architecture and underpinned by the Marvis AI engine. Mist is widely acknowledged as an industry leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) networking, as unlike competing AI networking solutions, it has been built from the ground up as AI-native for over a decade. Then there is the goal of assimilating Juniper’s top talent so HPE can refine its internal business processes, fine-tune the execution of strategy, and improve its go-to-market. One of the key figures that HPE aims to leverage following Juniper’s integration is current Juniper CEO Rami Rahim, who will take the helm of both the HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Juniper Networking business units. CEO Rami Rahim is relatively unique among Silicon Valley CEOs, because while the majority are either founders themselves or are parachuted in from other multinational firms, Rami was hired by Juniper as a junior Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) Design and Verification Engineer back in 1997, from where he steadily rose the ranks until he assumed the role of CEO in 2014. Rami’s long stewardship of one of the industry’s most innovative and disruptive wireless networking vendors will make him an invaluable asset to HPE. Another key figure that HPE will wish to retain is current Juniper Chief AI Officer Bob Friday, who was one of the original co-founders of Mist Systems (which was itself bought by Juniper in 2019), and is well respected as an AI thought leader. Bob’s AI credentials will likely be put to use to help spur the evolution of HPE’s future AI strategy.

So how have these goals been impacted by the prolonged period of investigation by the DOJ and the organization’s decision to force HPE to license the Juniper Mist AI source code? As things stand today, significant damage has already been inflicted upon HPE and Juniper by the 18 months of uncertainty both companies were forced to bear. During this limbo period, neither company was able to set out a concrete roadmap, and a lack of clarity over how the merger would be handled caused both customers and internal staff to be concerned over how it would impact them. The disruption resulted in HPE losing market share to the competition (sliding from 18.5% of the market to 17.1% between 3Q 2023 and 3Q 2024), and contributed to Juniper Networks’ 2024 revenue declining 9% year-over-year. Both companies also experienced heightened staff churn as people began fearing that their jobs might be made redundant after the transition or that the result of the DOJ decision would negatively impact the future prospects of their employer. March this year alone saw the departure of Juniper’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jean English, and Juniper’s Vice President (VP) of Americas Channel Sales, Hope Galley, as well as HPE’s Head of North America Channel Sales, Phil Soper.

Then there is the forced licensing of the Mist AI source code. In the press conference following the deal’s closing, HPE CEO Antonio Neri attempted to downplay the impact of the decision by noting that the licensing was limited to the Mist AI source code only and not the entire Mist platform, although few would disagree that Mist’s AI capabilities are the crown jewels of Juniper’s technology stack. HPE must license the technology to at least two other companies, with bids for the licenses beginning at US$8 million (a starting price that massively undervalues the technology’s capabilities). While we have no indication as to who will bid for the technology, and won’t do for some time, ABI Research believes that it is unlikely to be one of the major enterprise networking competitors of HPE. There are several reasons for this.

First, the optics of an enterprise networking vendor that identifies itself as an innovation leader choosing to license AI technology to the competition would be highly damaging, especially if HPE could claim that, unlike the licensee, it has the entire stack and not just a pared-back version. Second, all of the major enterprise networking vendors already have their own AI initiatives into which they have sunk considerable resources over recent years, and they are unlikely to write off these investments and close down/scale back their own AI teams to adopt a competitor’s solution, especially if they have no control over the direction of its development. Maintaining their own AI projects will enable them to ensure that the development trajectory of the solution is aligned with the needs of their customers, and will even allow them to potentially create key areas of differentiation from Mist. Third, abandoning a proprietary solution for an external alternative would be highly disruptive for the vendor’s existing and prospective clients, and regardless, it is not guaranteed that the Mist AI source code can be seamlessly integrated into all products and platforms.

For these reasons, it is unlikely to be a vendor in cutthroat competition with HPE that licenses Mist AI, but rather a vendor with a complementary, partnership-based relationship with HPE. These partnerships are likely to be found in markets that HPE does not address directly, which will include the SMB market after HPE has divested and off-loaded Instant On. In fact, it is quite possible that the future successor to Instant On may become a licensee itself. Other potential candidates include small-scale, agile Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) vendors like Nile Secure or Shasta Cloud, with customer segments that have little overlap with HPE’s.