Partners 'Excited' by HPE’s Acquisition of Juniper Networks

Channel partners are excited about HPE’s acquisition of Juniper Networks, according to Juniper's new EMEA channel leader.

Juniper partners asked Smith about the $14 billion acquisition by HPE at a recent channel event.

“When we get the opportunity to engage and explain and give them the insights around what it means, how we believe the new AI-native platform and cloud technology will enhance the joint propositions, they can see that it’s a great opportunity. They are really excited by it. That goes from your super VARs to smaller SIs, down to smaller boutique VARs. So we’re really pleased by the feedback,” he said.

“Of course, we do get tough questions because they want more answers and more detail, and they have to appreciate we don’t have every answer right now. But there is great excitement around this, and we’re definitely feeling that internally as well.”

Juniper Going ‘Full Throttle’ While HPE Acquisition Proceeds

Former UK channel head Smith was promoted to the new post after Sander Groot left Juniper last month after 22 years. In a LinkedIn post, Groot said he was putting “thought into what’s next.”

Meanwhile, Smith said it’s not "business as usual" for Juniper while HPE’s acquisition proceeds – the company is going “full throttle” in its efforts to seize enterprise share.

Juniper Networks' Dale Smith

He said Juniper was “planning partner investments, increasing profitability [and] team activities. We’re laying out our store for the year. We’re going to capitalize on the great momentum in the market. So our time is now, quite frankly.”

New Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform

HPE CEO Antonio Neri said the acquisition would help “bridge the AI-native and cloud-native worlds.”

Juniper recently launched what it described as the industry’s first AI-native networking platform. Trained on seven years of insights and data science development, the platform unifies all campus, branch and data center networking solutions with a common AI engine and the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA). This enables end-to-end AI for IT Operations (AIOps) for insight, automated troubleshooting and end-to-end networking assurance.

The company said the Juniper AI-native networking platform provides up to 85% lower operational expenditures than traditional solutions. It demonstrates the elimination of up to 90% of network trouble tickets, 85% of IT onsite visits and up to 50% reduction in network incident resolution times.

“We all recognize that the next wave of change in our industry and probably the world is AI,” said Smith. “I think that’s an obvious statement to make. There are a lot of vendors and manufacturers that are trying to get into that world. But fortunately for Juniper, we’ve been in that world for many years now, through [our acquisition of] Mist originally, and it’s now within our full portfolio. We’re in a very privileged position because now we have true AI in our technology full stack. And that’s great for our customers and partners.”