Juniper Networks exited its latest financial year on an upswing that CEO Rami Rahim’s said shows the networking giant remains operationally sound and has room to grow based on its artificial intelligence (AI) focus, while also backing the view that Juniper can be even stronger should Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) pending $14 billion acquisition withstand the Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit looking to block that deal.

“We haven't skipped a beat at Juniper as we go through this process, you can see it in our results,” Rahim told SDxCentral in an interview.

That confidence was backed by Juniper reporting a modest year-over-year and sequential uptick in revenues for the fourth quarter, which countered what had been a difficult fiscal year for the vendor up that point. Rahim noted that boost came from Juniper’s competitive stance in the current market backed by the vendor’s artificial intelligence (AI) positioning, which he said will only be enhanced by the HPE acquisition.

“I couldn't be more proud of the team,” Rahim continued. “We're performing exceptionally well as a standalone company, but I am a firm believer that we will be an even stronger company when this deal is cleared and we become part of the HPE family. And then once that happens, I'm excited to partner up with Antonio to head up the combined networking business and to double down on the innovation that's happening both in the space of AI for networks and networks for AI.”

Juniper’s robust earnings came despite claims from rival Cisco that the pending HPE acquisition was causing “uncertainty” in the market. This notion has been backed by some analysts who have heard enterprises are indeed being impacted.

“I’ve had customers put things on hold right now, and not just the Juniper side but both sides,” Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said in an interview with SDxCentral about how Juniper and HPE customers are reacting to uncertainty around the deal. “Typically, if customers are strong enough to look outside of Cisco and they’re not a Cisco shop, then HPE, Aruba, Juniper are the primary ones that they’re looking at. I’ve had customers put some of that on hold at this point.”

Juniper’s AI opportunity Rahim said he sees that AI opportunity in three areas: selling and partnering with hyperscalers; sovereign clouds; and large enterprises.

That first opportunity is targeted at working with hyperscalers that are working on large-scale AI and large language models (LLMs) in centralized locations. This includes the construction of large data centers that are placed close to where those hyperscalers can gain access to inexpensive power resources.

“That's one opportunity that's here and we're already seeing some significant momentum,” Rahim said.

The second opportunity is the growing development of sovereign clouds that are data center locations deployed in specific countries or regions to satisfy customer or regulatory demands. These are markets where those regulatory demands require enterprises to conduct AI learning and inferencing within specific borders.

“Take, for example, large projects happening in the Middle East, where they want to build Arabic large language models,” Rahim explained.

The third opportunity involves Juniper working directly with enterprises to help them in networking self-built AI stacks. These are initially going to be large enterprises with the ability to build these stacks and run their own application for fine tuning and inference.

“That's more of an emerging opportunity, to capture that opportunity, or to accelerate the pace of that opportunity,” Rahim said.

Rahim also noted that the inferencing opportunity can be targeted at telecom operators that control prime real estate within the AI ecosystem.

“Connectivity alone is not enough to pay the bills so one of the most important emerging models is the understanding that inferencing is not all going to happen in centralized locations. It's, in fact, going to happen closer to where the data resides,” Rahim explained. “In some cases, it might make sense for large enterprise, large financial organizations and banks to do that inferencing on-premises. But I also think there's a very large opportunity for telcos to do that inferencing where they have beach-front property at the edge that connects directly to their enterprise customers.”

Telecom CEOs have been discussing this opportunity.

Verizon recently signed a deal with Nvidia to power enterprise AI services and digital transformation efforts running over the carrier’s 5G private network and mobile edge compute (MEC) infrastructure. Adam Koeppe, SVP of technology planning at Verizon, in a recent interview with SDxCentral touted the carrier’s architecture and its ability to support AI-derived use cases.

“I think it’s really important to look at what these capabilities exist within the architecture, and how can AI, true AI, augment things that are already being done or create things that are brand new,” Koeppe said. “Where I see our evolution occurring is when you have an advanced cloud platform, as we do, you have an orchestration layer on top that we already have, and you then find ways to incorporate new AI capabilities on top of that. That’s going to allow your engineers and your operators to interface differently.”

T-Mobile US is also working to turn its cell site locations into edge data centers or cloud connections that can in turn better serve AI workloads.

“These kinds of AI workloads will increasingly demand that processing have happen on the device, which we’re starting to see but there are obvious limitations there, or on a cloud near the device, and that’s a business opportunity that we see in the future,” T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert said.

Juniper’s challenges remain Juniper’s AI positioning has been lauded by analysts that have pointed to the vendor’s growing reputation in the AI space.

Woo Jin Ho, senior industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, explained to SDxCentral in an interview that a recent CIO survey conducted by his firm found Juniper ranked surprisingly high in AI networking, “which really shocked me because you don’t think of them as an AI networker.”

“When you think of these AI networkers, it's Cisco to some degree, It's Nvidia and Arista. … Juniper is not on the map,” Ho said.

However, HPE obviously sees value in Juniper’s AI-powered Mist platform as it relates to powering HPE’s competitive position.

“I get where [HPE CEO Antonio Neri] is coming from because essentially what they can do is take Mist and port that over to the Aruba platform over time,” Ho said of HPE’s Juniper interest. “On the Wi-Fi side as well as the campus switching side if they can successfully do that now they can go or toe-to-toe with Cisco with these campus switching deals.”

Despite the outside drama, Rahim publicly remains steadfast in Juniper’s AI opportunities.

“The opportunities are abundant, and our differentiation has never been stronger,” Rahim said.