Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to purchase networking equipment specialist Juniper Networks in an all-cash deal worth in the region of $14 billion.
The deal represents a doubling of the HPE business; Juniper CEO Rami Rahim would lead the combined group, reporting to HPE CEO, Antonio Neri, according a company statement released Tuesday.
Juniper was founded in 1996 and for many years was in competition with Cisco in the networking space.
In a blog post, Rahim compared the dot-com boom with the company’s seven year investment in AI. “This combination will supercharge our offerings in AI-native networking. Together, we will accelerate innovation at every layer: compute, storage and networking; silicon, systems and software; campus and branch, data center and the wide area network,” he said.
“This combination is expected to dramatically increase the global footprint and reach across all customer verticals, including cloud, service provider and enterprise.”
The deal is expected to close and the end of the calendar year or early in 2025.
