Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) pending acquisition of Juniper Networks and Cisco’s recent corporate restructuring that de-emphasizes some of its legacy operations is causing a run of chaos across the networking ecosystem that has some enterprises pausing investments as they wait out the storm. It’s also opening potential conquest opportunities for rivals.

“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.”

That holding pattern is tied to uncertainty over what systems and platforms will emerge from a combined HPE-Juniper.

Kindness noted in a blog post when the deal was announced that “the journey ahead will be rife with obstacles for Juniper and HPE/Aruba customers alike.” Kindness explained that one important move for HPE would be to “rationalize/optimize the portfolio, the products and the solutions.”

“HPE will try to reassure you that nothing will change; it doesn’t make sense to keep everything, especially the multiple AP [access point] product lines (Instant On, Mist, and Aruba Aps), all the routing and switching operating systems (Juno, AOS-CX, and ArubaOS) and both management systems (Central and Mist),” Kindness wrote. “Though not immediately, products will need to go and the hardware that stays will need to be changed to accommodate cloud-based management, monitoring, and AI.”

HPE CEO Antonio Neri and that management team has attempted to temper these concerns by stating there is virtually no overlap between HPE and Juniper’s product lines, which Kindness said, “just boggles my mind.”

“I think [Neri’s] got to worry about the financial analyst out there in the stock market or the shareholders to pacify them, and then at the same time you don't want to scare the bejesus out of your customer base, or Juniper customer base, so you're going to say that there's going to be either no overlap or no changes, everything will coexist,” Kindness added.

While overlap and other concerns could alter what a potential Juniper-ified HPE looks like, Kindness did note he expects the result to lean heavily on Juniper’s telecom and networking assets. This includes HPE products like Aruba being replaced by Juniper’s artificial intelligence (AI)-focused Mist and Marvis platforms.

“Mist has been really a game changer for the company and just really opened a lot of doors,” Kindness explained. “[Juniper] really did a 180 when they bought [Mist], and just the revenue that's brought in and the expansion of the product line itself, and the capabilities of Mist and actually Marvis in the background would be hard for [HPE] to replicate at this point. My perception was HPE looked at it and said, Marvis and Mist is just something that would take too long to get to.”

Kindness added that he does not expect significant platform thinning to happen for a couple of years after a potential closing of the deal, but the interim could be filled with challenges tied to channel partners and go-to-market strategies that could chip away at market opportunities similar to what is happening at VMware following the Broadcom acquisition.

“Broadcom is ruthless, right or wrong, it's its business model,” Kindness said. “HPE is not quite that dynamic.”

Rivals targeting HPE-Juniper and Cisco changes In the meantime, HPE will have its work cut out in terms of maintaining enterprise interest. Kindness noted that many enterprises have multi-year buying cycles when it comes to networking equipment, which could provide HPE with time in terms of resetting its future platform plans.

However, rivals will not be so patient.

Cisco, for its part, has stirred some of that drama, with CFO Scott Herren telling the audience at a recent investor conference that HPE’s pending Juniper acquisition is causing “uncertainty” in the enterprise WLAN market that could be benefit Cisco.

“I think for sure that’s created just a degree of uncertainty and a question of, hey, should I consider if I was previously a vendor or a customer of either of those, now is the time to kind of open up and look at other opportunities,” Herren said. “And we’ve seen our wireless business, our orders greater than $1 million grew more than 20% in the fourth quarter.”

Of course, Cisco is also working through its own networking drama as part of the vendor’s recently announced restructuring process. Those moves will see Cisco focus more on high-growth areas like AI, security, and cloud at the expense of its legacy operations, including the pairing down of its networking product lines.

“It looks like Cisco’s realizing that all the complexity of customer choice and all these variations and offering a zillion features is probably not the way to go. I think Chuck realized it,” Kindness said of Cisco’s efforts. “If you look at the ACI [Application Centric Infrastructure] and Cloud Dashboard for Nexus starting to consolidate, and then the Catalyst line and the Aironet line and the Meraki line are consolidating, it’s just the right move. The market has told them that for the last 10 years, it just took them a while to recognize it.”

A handful of other rivals have highlighted conquest opportunities, with Kindness pointing to vendors like Arista and Extreme Networks.

Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord during that vendor’s recent earnings call said, “we are taking share from Cisco, and then … some of the wins we referenced are from Juniper and HPE, but I think the way to think about it is commensurate with share positions, with most coming from Cisco.”

Extreme Networks Chief Commercial Officer Norman Rice in an interview with SDxCentral provided further color on the Cisco conquest opportunities, explaining that Cisco’s recently closed Splunk acquisition has that vendor’s previous cybersecurity partners looking for new opportunities.

“It’s creating sort of a vacuum effect that’s going on in our category,” Rice said. “We see the likes of Fortinet trying to cross over into networking more than ever before. We're seeing Palo Alto [Networks] actually get friendlier with us, which is a really good thing for us because it gives us a bit of alignment there. We'd rather partner with them with our integrated offering because the capabilities are so broad. And we see that consolidating security, not us. We see them being able to do that.”

Specific to HPE and Juniper, Meyercord during the earnings call hinted at conquest opportunities once that deal closes.

“I will say that we are anticipating with the closing of the HPE-Juniper deal, they have some tough decisions to make. They have tough news to break to the market in terms of their roadmaps, what it means for stranding investments for customers, what does it mean for partners in the new landscape, and we would expect that disruption to create some opportunities for us, but we don’t expect that to truly take place until that transaction closes,” Meyercord said.