‘I feel like a little bit of a kid in a candy store right now looking at technology components all around me, and my team and I are just super excited to roll up our sleeves and get that roadmap that everybody is very interested in seeing,’ says Rami Rahim, former Juniper Networks CEO and current HPE Networking leader.
Rami Rahim, Juniper Networks’ former CEO and current president and general manager of HPE’s $9.6 billion networking business, is ready to “roll up” his sleeves and get to work with HPE CEO Antonio Neri on creating an AI-powered networking powerhouse that’s ready to take on market heavyweight Cisco Systems.
That’s because HPE’s long road to close its $13.4 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks ended Wednesday when the two companies completed the blockbuster $13.4 billion deal, making Juniper Networks, officially, a wholly owned subsidiary of HPE.
“It’s truly an exciting day for all of us at Juniper and HPE, and of course, for our customers, our partners, and I believe the industry as a whole,” Rahim told reporters and analysts on Wednesday morning. “As separate companies, we have delivered differentiated networking solutions to customers around the globe, and now we’re even better together, offering secure AI native networks that address the biggest opportunities across all the customer segments, from cloud providers to service providers and enterprises. Now, customers will have access to both Juniper networking and HPE Aruba networking solutions all from a single company.
Rahim believes that the new entity is better positioned now than ever before to help partners and customers capitalize on the big opportunities of AI for networks and networks for AI.
“The road ahead is full of promise,” Rahim said.
In a webcast and Q&A session on Wednesday, Neri and Rahim took on the biggest questions on everyone’s minds around the future of the combined company. Here’s what Rahim had to say about the integration plan for Juniper Mist, the fate of Juniper’s security portfolio, and how HPE Networking will compete against its biggest rivals.
What are the top priorities for the Juniper team right now and what’s immediately changing for Juniper customers?
We’re going to have this true North of AI native, cloud native, secure networking. We need to now work on a thoughtful integration strategy that leverages the best of both worlds. The assets that HPE [Juniper] Networking bring from both sides are truly unique in this industry. We are going to be a unique technology provider with all of the technology building blocks, both within networking and security, but also across the compute, AI and storage ecosystem, to build incredible solutions for our customers. Solutions that enhance the operational experience for those that manage networks, and also, solutions that delight the end user that is using IT, using networking to do practically anything today. That is my immediate priority as the leader of the new networking business.
How will a now combined HPE-Juniper compete with Cisco in the networking space?
I have always operated in a very competitive environment. I’ve basically devoted my career to competing with the large players in our industry, Cisco included. I think together, HPE and Juniper will have the most comprehensive, secure AI native, client to cloud portfolio of networking products. But it doesn’t stop there. We’re also going to be the only technology provider to have all of the critical elements of IT across compute, storage, networking and software. We’re going to have a worldwide go to market and partner ecosystem that gives us scale to compete on a global level. And we’re going to have with the added technology components, the scale [and] the ability to invest and to capture more of these market inflection points that seem like they’re popping up on a daily or weekly basis, especially around AI. I am a technologist at heart, and when I look at the opportunity here to combine technologies and teams to compete, not just with Cisco, but with this very vibrant, very competitive landscape. It’s incredibly, incredibly exhilarating to me.
How exactly will Juniper Mist integrate into the HPE portfolio?
First, it’s important to recognize, this is day one, and we’re just getting started. But I can tell you, my objective here as the leader of this combined networking business is to build the best networking business really on the planet, one that’s founded in innovation. We plan on doing this first by starting to focus on our customers and partners. We’re seeing great momentum in both the Juniper portfolio as well as HP Aruba Networking, and we want to protect that and immediately, right now, I’m rolling up my sleeves and starting on a customer and market-focused, thoughtful integration strategy, and we’re going to be guided in that work that we’re starting now by a true North, which is around secure AI native and cloud native networking. Very importantly, this is the one thing I really want everybody to recognize and to understand, is that all our customers, whether they’re starting their journey on the Aruba side or the Juniper side, are going to have a path to that exciting true North. It’s too early at this point to provide you with the specifics and the timelines, but that is the strategy that we are embarking on, and nobody gets left behind.
I know there’s a lot of focus on areas where there is real strength on both sides, especially in the domain of network automation, AI operations and so forth, and I would just highlight that, if you look architecturally, HPE and Juniper both bring incredible strengths in different architectural approaches to solving networking problems. So together, the opportunity here is to build something that will capture more use cases, whether they be cloud or on-premises with integrated security; the sky’s the limit in terms of how these things comes to these things come together to capture greater levels of innovation, but then also to capture a much broader set of use cases in different network scenarios. That’s what I’m really excited about. I feel like a little bit of a kid in a candy store right now looking at technology components all around me, and my team and I are just super excited to roll up our sleeves and get that roadmap that everybody is very interested in seeing.
How will the newly converged company work with open source, and open source organizations?
Open source has always been an important part of Juniper’s, and I’m sure also HPE’s innovation agenda. For example, in networking, open source, in areas like SONiC has picked up some momentum [and] has traction in the industry. For that reason, Juniper has decided to innovate in this area, and I’m sure that will sort of extend into the new HPE Networking business. I think more of the same for the time being, but with an opportunity now, because of the expanded portfolio, not just within networking, but across compute, storage and networking, to do even more in the open source space.
If the question is around open standards, that remains a core tenant of what we will do in the HPE Networking business. At the end of the day, I think this combination gives us this awesome ability to combine technology components to provide soup to nuts solutions for our customers that can make their life tremendously easier to deploy AI learning, AI inferencing, but I think a core tenant of providing those solutions is going to be to leverage open interfaces, APIs, because that’s what our customers want. So, I’m excited to start assembling these solutions and getting them into the hands of our customers.
What are the big areas of opportunity for AI that you see in the networking space right now?
When I think about the opportunity here, I look at it from two standpoints. There’s AI for networks and networks for AI. From the standpoint of AI for networks, the goal here is to achieve truly best experiences for our customers and partners with now broader deployments on both sides across the world that we have to learn from and apply to AI operations. We’ll have greater range and flexibility, because we’ll be able to now, with the strength that both HPE and Juniper bring to the table, satisfy more use cases with more deployment options, and then we’re going to have greater integrated security. Some of the security assets that Juniper brings to the table, as well as that HPE has with technologies like [Secure] Access [that] gives us an incredible ability to combine networking solutions in ways that others simply cannot.
That’s the first opportunity of AI for networks. The second opportunity of networks for AI is equally exciting. Here we’re building the large-scale data centers, the factories for AI, that are incredibly important in today’s environment. Together, we’ll be able to innovate faster across all layers of the technology stack, from silicon to systems to software, and we’re going to have a complete solution. Who else is going to be able to offer everything from the networking — both scale up, scale out — compute, storage, the automation capabilities, liquid pooling? I mean, the technology available to us to build these integrated AI factory data centers is truly unique in our industry.
On the cybersecurity front, what will happen to Juniper SRX firewalls and SASE?
First of all, I truly believe that networking and security are converging in our market. More and more customers want full-stack solutions that include both components. I also am incredibly excited about the security building blocks we’re going to now have on both the HPE Aruba side and Juniper [side] to capture our customers use cases in both AI for networks and networks for AI. Let’s start with AI for networks. The world is moving towards zero trust. The assets that we’re going to have across things like the firewall that’s on-prem, the SSE capabilities that are in the cloud, the NAC capabilities that come from HPE and from Juniper, the software automation and networking that goes all the way from client to cloud with security embedded throughout, is incredible, and the ability now to encapsulate solutions that are going to solve this zero-trust architecture requirement of our customers today and in the future Is just really awesome. And then in the space of networks for AI around building these next generation data centers, both compute-based and AI-based, we have some incredible next-generation firewall assets, both virtual and physical. Just as an example, Juniper recently introduced and shipped the world’s fastest firewall, the SRX 4700 [with] 1.4 terabits of security capacity, which is absolutely ideal for what customers are looking for as they build out these data centers, where current solutions in the market, unfortunately, are just not keeping up with the incredible pace that traffic is growing. So, the takeaway here, I think is, one, the market is moving towards convergence. Two, HPE Networking will have all of the building blocks necessary to meet our customers in ways that I think our competitors will not be able to.
