What Juniper’s acquisition means for HPE’s network security, SD-WAN aspirations?

Today, the networking industry experienced a tectonic shift with HPE’s announcement that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Juniper for a cool $14 B. Juniper has long been known as a premier service provider router company, and, more recently, as darling in the enterprise networking space with the AI-powered MIST WLAN solutions. HPE has been in the networking industry even longer, going back to the 1980s, and most recently, a well-regarded enterprise networking player with Aruba campus solutions. However, both firms have a wider portfolio that spans the network security and SASE/SD-WAN technology landscape, which is my focus. Figure 1 below shows the technology segments I cover.

In this blog, I share some quick thoughts on what the merger may mean from the lens of the technologies I cover.

Key takeaways and my opinions on HPE’s acquisition of Juniper from the context of technologies I cover are:

• The overlap between both is limited to SASE (Figure 2). Both have SD-WAN and SSE offerings to provide a single-vendor SASE solution:

• The overlap in SASE should be straightforward to reconcile since HPE has a much larger business than Juniper. In 3Q23, HPE was the tenth largest SASE vendor by revenue and its business was nearly four times larger than Juniper’s SASE business (which occupied the 18th revenue position).
• Outside of SASE, Juniper extends HPE’s reach into the DDoS, Firewall, Cloud Workload Security, and Distributed Cloud Networking markets.
• My SWOT analysis

Strengths

• Juniper brings a number of network security technology capabilities that HPE lacks.
• Juniper’s reputation in the cloud and comms service provider space will help HPE’s overall credibility.

Weaknesses

• Juniper’s network security market share is small compared to the big 3 of Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks

Opportunities

• Quickly align behind Axis Security for SSE for both HPE and Juniper customers to accelerate uptake. Juniper’s SSE solution relies on OEM’ed technology.
• Enable the total HPE salesforce to sell all Juniper products.

Threats

• Bungle the SASE integration and fall further behind
• HP/HPE has had a troubled past trying to sell network security. Juniper’s security business may further be marginalized.
• HPE has had a checkered past with company acquisitions (Colubris wireless, 3Com/H3C networking, TippingPoint security). Aruba has been a bright star.