CEO Antonio Neri On Why HPE-Juniper Is A New ‘Industry Powerhouse’ That Will Drive ‘Market Share And Profit Creation’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri sounded off on the successful completion of HPE’s $13.4 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks including the settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the integration of the two product portfolios and partner programs, and bringing the two cultures together into a single company.

An Industry Powerhouse To ‘Define And Lead The Future’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri said the successful completion of the $13.4 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks creates a new “industry powerhouse” with the “vision, scale and innovation to define and lead” customers and partners to reimagine the future in the AI networking era.

“We are not just building a stronger company,” said Neri speaking to industry analysts and the press in a conference call after the company announced the completion of the deal. “We are establishing an industry powerhouse with the vision, scale and innovation to define and lead the future, one that will serve our customers and partners better than ever and reimagine what is possible.”

The closing of the acquisition comes four days after the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to settle the lawsuit challenging the blockbuster deal and 18 months after the acquisition was first proposed by HPE.

“This is a new era of IT defined by the convergence of networking, hybrid cloud and AI, and the role of networking as the connected fabric for both the enterprise and service providers which has never been more relevant,” said Neri, proclaiming it an “exciting day” for HPE and the IT market. “So with today’s announcement we mark the beginning of what I call a new exciting chapter for HPE. Our powerful combination with Juniper will enable HPE to offer an industry-leading, secure, cloud-native, AI-driven portfolio including a full modern networking stack.”

Juniper becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of HPE with the combined HPE networking business to be headed by former Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim, who becomes the president and general manager of the new HPE Networking business.

HPE said the Aruba and Juniper brands will continue side by side with the HPE brand under HPE Juniper Networking and HPE Aruba Networking with the combined business referred to as HPE Networking.

Neri said the deal marks the first time in his seven and a half years as the CEO that HPE has had the “entire technology stack to drive a modern, secure AI-driven portfolio which both customers and technology demands now because AI has obviously changed everything. So there is a view for shareholders and there is a view for customers and partners which ultimately translates into market share and profit creation.”

As for the financial impact of the acquisition, Neri said the deal will be “accretive” to non-GAAP earnings per share in the first year with more than 50 percent of HPE’s operating profits coming from the HPE Networking business unit.

Over time, Neri said, the deal will translate into “market share” gains. “Market share drives revenue and profit,” he said. “That is fundamentally what you should see going forward.”

Here are the five boldest statement from Neri’s press conference on the successful completion of HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks.

On The DOJ Requiring HPE To License Juniper AIOps for Mist And Divesting HPE Aruba Instant On

What we have agreed to with the DOJ is to offer a license through an auction to a specific aspect of Juniper Mist which is just the AI operations part. So that’s what it entails – not the entire Juniper Mist code- which obviously is very extensive. And obviously it has a lot of awareness that (Former Juniper Networks CEO and current HPE Networking President) Rami (Rahim) built over many, many years. This is just the AI Operations part of that.

The license is basically the ability for them to acquire the license. Then obviously we will have to support that license.So the intellectual property obviously stays with us but we have to be able to support them as we go forward. But again it is only the AI operations portion of the Juniper Mist stack.

The Aruba Instant On business is a very new business that was built over the last three years or so. It is completely separate from the rest of the traditional HPE Aruba platform or Aruba Central. This is a unique offer targeting the SMB segment of the market and more specifically the S in the SMB. It’s a very small business for us.

On The Impact On Partners And Sparking More Innovation In AI Networking

Look, every partner I spoke with and I know Rami did as well is super excited about this combination. In fact, they were wondering when we were going to be able to close this transaction. We had tremendous engagement from partners throughout the process even as of last week when we hosted our Partner Growth Summit in Las Vegas.So I am super excited for them!

From a programmatic perspective HPE has already combined the partners programs. We have done that. We announced that last week with new features at HPE Discover. So now HPE has one comprehensive channel program which includes all aspects of our channel business. And then over time we are going to integrate the Juniper channel program so (partners) can sell the entire portfolio because obviously we want to make sure that they can take advantage of everything the networking business now has to offer. That will be done over time as we integrate the sales processes and the programs.

This will drive more innovation for our customers. In the United States there are at least seven plus competitors that compete in aspects of the networking business. Therefore I think this combination will create more competition and more innovation as we go forward. And then outside the United States there is even more competition. So this will actually drive faster focus on that innovation and then position us to compete and win against others that today independently we can’t. That is true also outside the United States.

On Juniper Networking Innovation Moving Into The HPE Stack And GreenLake Intelligence

Rami will build the core foundation at the networking level and many of the products and software and services will find their way outside of networking inside a private cloud stack, inside the architecture with (HPE Executive Vice President and General Manager of Servers) Neil (MacDonald) on the server side and obviously at the AI level as well as the storage business because obviously you need a networking fabric that enables the connectivity of media and controllers and provides modern AI-driven storage solutions. This is why I am excited. It is not just networking for networking. It is networking for the rest of the portfolio.

GreenLake Intelligence (Agentic AI Framework) goes beyond networking through the rest of the portfolio. So as we integrate the data center aspects of the portfolio with the rest of the HPE portfolio and what we have done with OpsRamp, obviously Juniper brings amazing assets both at the software defined networking level and at the telemetry level to be able to really provide a comprehensive intelligent framework soup to nuts, top to bottom, from top of rack down into the lowest resource. But as Rami said obviously we have to go through that work. It is not just as simple as integrating telemetry. It is also architectural work because we want to continue to deliver the most simple, automated, AI driven experience.

On Leaving ‘No Customer Behind’ In the HPE-Juniper Integration

I think there will be quick wins that we will be able to achieve with Rami and the ones that are more architectural driven may take a little longer. But as Rami said, ‘No customer will be left behind’- and we definitely want to leverage the best of both worlds because we are going to have a tremendous opportunity to drive significant innovation across the stack, and definitely GreenLake will be a core tenet of that no different than for the rest of the business.

No customer – no one- is going to be left behind. Contracts will be honored for the life of the product. Each product or each contract has a life. And then when a product eventually through a natural transition goes through end of life there is a guaranteed support agreement that is there for a number of years. The bottom line is that nobody should have any concerns. We are supporting both products as we go forward.

When you look at traditional (market) segments I think about two segments: service providers and enterprise. On the service provider side obviously Rami just talked about the ability to provide integrated AI factories from the rack architecture with partners like Nvidia all the way to the data center and as we build new data centers. Clearly Juniper has been one of the key market leaders and as far as I remember 30 percent of the internet traffic goes through Juniper infrastructure. So that is very straight forward. HPE has no infrastructure in that space. Now we can drive a better cohesive architecture with compute and our partners. Second is the cloud. Juniper has been doing that for some time.

In enterprise and the data center, Rami has an extensive set of products and HPE has built some very innovative products. We’re going to integrate the two over time and drive a very comprehensive portfolio. And then in campus and branch and enterprise as we said we will add that thoughtfully and nobody will be left behind because now we have the best of both worlds as we go forward.

On Combining The HPE-Juniper Cultures Together Into One Company

This is one of the most exciting parts of this to me because I would say both company cultures are very, very similar. They are very purpose driven. At HPE we have a purpose to advance the way people live and work. At Juniper, it is every connection counts. The values are very similar, very engineering driven, very innovation driven. We have done a very good job with Rami and the team thinking ahead and we will be unveiling a new cultural blueprint leveraging the best of both worlds.

Two weeks ago, we rolled out a new HPE brand which has been extremely well received. We showcased that brand at HPE Discover. Now we are going to showcase the new combined culture and show it to our employees first.

As I went through my journey here obviously bringing unique companies and talent into the HPE family to me that is one of the critical success factors. That is why we spend so much time working with the collective teams to put that blueprint for our culture together going forward.

This story was originally published on our sister site, CRN.