EU clears HPE’s $14 billion Juniper acquisition

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s proposed acquisition of Juniper Networks took a big step forward this week as the European Commission unconditionally approved the buy.  

In January, HPE said it buy Juniper Networks for $14 billion, effectively doubling HPE’s networking business by adding a significant, though somewhat overlapping, campus and data-center product lineup.

Juniper’s enterprise networking business became the largest of its three core divisions – cloud, service provider and enterprise – in the first quarter of 2022 for the first time in Juniper’s history, and it has continued to grow since then.

The buy is primarily about AI technology for HPE. It stands to gain Juniper’s cloud-based Mist AI family, which includes Mist’s virtual network assistant, Marvis. Marvis can detect, describe and help fix myriad network problems, including persistently failing wired or wireless clients, bad cables, access-point coverage holes, problematic WAN links, and insufficient radio-frequency capacity.

Aside from the Juniper technology, HPE recently announced a portfolio of AI products and services jointly developed with Nvidia that it hopes will help enterprises realize the productivity benefits of generative AI, ideally by using its products on-premises or in hybrid clouds.

Juniper, too, has been enhancing its AI capabilities recently. It extended its AI platform with a package of features dubbed Operations for AI (Ops4AI). The additions enable congestion control, load-balancing and management capabilities for systems controlled by the vendor’s core Junos and Juniper Apstra data center intent-based networking software.

The EU’s investigation

Before announcing its approval, the European Commission said it investigated the impact of the transaction on four core markets: the worldwide markets for the supply of wireless local area network (WLAN) equipment; the supply of wireless access points (WAPs); the supply of Ethernet campus switches; and supply of data center switches.

“Based on its market investigation, the Commission found that the transaction, as notified, would not significantly reduce competition on such markets,” the Commission said in a statement. “In particular, concerning the horizontal overlaps between the companies’ activities in the market for WLAN equipment, WAPs and Ethernet campus switches, the Commission found that in the EEA … the merged entity would continue to face competition from a wide range of competitors, including strong and established players on each of the markets.”

The commission went on to state that “customers have a certain level of countervailing buyer power, allowing them to react in case of price increases of WLAN equipment and Ethernet campus switches,” and that “HPE and Juniper are not each other’s closest competitors.”

In addition, “the merged entity would not obtain a significant advantage by offering its data center switches as a bundle with either HPE’s servers or HPE’s HPC systems,” and that “competitors could replicate and challenge any tied or bundled products.”

Regulators from the UK and the US Federal Trade Commission still need to weigh in on the acquisition, which is still slated to close in early 2025.

Read more about HPE’s acquisition and Juniper’s AI assets

• HPE-Juniper’s AI story resonates, but customer concerns linger
• Juniper advances AI networking software with congestion control, load balancing
• Juniper amps up AI networking plans
• HPE-Juniper merger faces antitrust inquiry in UK
• Juniper expands AI management features for wired, wireless networks
• Juniper brings AI to data center operations