Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has completed its long-awaited $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.
The announcement comes just a few days after the Department of Justice (DOJ) approved the deal following HPE's agreement to a number of potentially significant conditions.
HPE first announced the deal in January of last year, as part of its plans to combine Juniper and Aruba services to take on Cisco.
The company said the deal will support its ambitions to serve the AI and hybrid cloud market.
HPE notes that the transaction doubles the size of its networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions.
“Today begins a new era for HPE – we are now at the epicenter of the transformation of IT, where AI and networking are converging,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE.
“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.”
HPE noted that the acquisition bolsters its full networking IP stack while also enabling the company to reach large adjacent markets, including data centers, firewalls, and routers.
Founded in 1996 and based in Sunnyvale, California, NYSE-listed Juniper provides networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, and software-defined networking (SDN) technology.
HPE offers switches via its Aruba Networks unit – acquired in 2015 just prior to Hewlett Packard's split into two companies.
Since it was broken off from HP in 2015, HPE’s acquisitions include SGI, Cray, SimpliVity, and Nimble Storage.
As reported by DCD's sister publication SDx earlier this week, HPE agreed to divest its Instant On wireless LAN (WLAN) campus and branch network switching business. This includes all of that unit’s assets, intellectual property, research and development employees, and customer relationships “to a DOJ-approved buyer within 180 days,” the DOJ noted.
HPE is also required to license Juniper’s AI Ops for Mist source code. This will be done via an auction process with the license to be “perpetual, non-exclusive, and include optional transitional support and personnel transfers to facilitate competition,” the DOJ added.
The DOJ had initially sought to block the deal, filing a complaint last year, in which it argued the acquisition poses a threat to competition for enterprise Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) used by large companies, universities, and hospitals.
Following its own investigation into the deal, UK watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) cleared the takeover in August.
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