Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the successful completion of its previously announced acquisition of Juniper Networks, Inc. The combination positions HPE to capture the growing artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud market opportunity by creating a cloud-native and AI-driven IT portfolio, including a full, modern networking stack.

The transaction doubles the size of HPE’s networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions. It also accelerates the company’s portfolio mix shift to higher-margin, higher-growth areas and positions the company for long-term profitable revenue growth.

Strategic and financial benefits of this deal are as follows:

  • Transformative for HPE’s strategic evolution: The acquisition accelerates HPE’s strategic vision with a full networking IP stack, from silicon, to hardware, to the operating system, to security, to software and services, with a cloud-native and AI-driven approach. This integration will accelerate customers’ deployment and adoption of both hybrid cloud and AI.
  • Bolsters HPE’s position as a networking leader: The acquisition doubles the size of HPE’s networking business, substantially increasing its scope and total addressable market. The combined company will reach large adjacent markets, including data centre, firewalls, and routers, bridging the global strength of HPE in enterprise security-first networking and secure access service edge (SASE) security with Juniper’s position in data centre, service provider, and AI-native solutions.
  • Provides customers with a leading AI-native foundation for their end-to-end networking needs: The transaction builds on the combined capabilities of HPE and Juniper to provide customers of all sizes with the modern networking architecture to manage and simplify increasingly complex connectivity needs – particularly those driven by data-intensive, hybrid AI workloads. Greater research and development scale will enable faster innovation across networking silicon, systems, and software.
  • Gives customers access to HPE’s full portfolio offering across networking, hybrid cloud, and AI: Networking customers will benefit from HPE innovation across its full portfolio offering – including hybrid cloud, storage, compute, and software – to accelerate and simplify their AI transformations.
  • Capitalises on HPE’s go-to-market scale: The transaction creates revenue growth opportunities, as Juniper offerings benefit from HPE’s large, global go-to-market model and team. The combined company will offer secure, AI-native solutions with the ability to collect, analyse, and act on insightful network data across a broader installed base.
  • Attractive financial profile expected to deliver strong value for HPE shareholders: The acquisition of Juniper’s high-margin business is expected to be accretive in the near- and long-term for the combined company. The transaction will be accretive to non-generally accepted accounting principles earnings per share (GAAP EPS) in year one, post close, with the combined networking business contributing more than 50 per cent of total company operating income.

Commenting on the announcement, Antonio Neri, president and chief executive officer (CEO), HPE, said, “Today begins a new era for HPE – we are now at the epicentre of the transformation of IT, where AI and networking are converging. In addition to positioning HPE to offer our customers a modern network architecture alternative and an even more differentiated and complete portfolio across hybrid cloud, AI, and networking, this combination accelerates our profitable growth strategy as we deepen our customer relevance and expand our total addressable market into attractive adjacent areas. We look forward to welcoming the Juniper team to HPE.”

Meanwhile, Rami Rahim, former CEO, Juniper Networks, said, “HPE and Juniper have a unique opportunity to disrupt the networking industry at the most important and relevant time. Together, we will be able to provide customers and partners with a secure network that is purpose-built with AI and for AI.”

Further, the acquisition was originally announced on January 9, 2024, and was approved by Juniper shareholders on April 2, 2024. With the completion of the transaction, shares of Juniper’s common stock, which traded on the NYSE under the symbol “JNPR,” will cease trading as of today and will no longer be listed on the NYSE.