The biggest acquisition news in the networking industry in 2024 (so far) is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) planned $14 billion buy of Juniper networks.

For the Silicon Valley stalwart, the acquisition marks yet another attempt at remaking itself with a high-value acquisition. It's a well-trodden path for HPE, which until 2015 was just Hewlett Packard (HP), and not two separate companies (HPE and HP Inc). HP is the original Silicon Valley startup, launched by two guys in a garage and it has certainly had more than its fair share of attempts at growth via acquisition.

While $14 billion is hardly pocket change, HP has a long history of trying to remake itself with large acquisitions. Two decades ago HP tried to remake itself as a server and PC vendor with the $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002. A decade later in 2011, HP acquired Autonomy for $11.7 billion, in a deal that some have argued was one of the worst enterprise IT acquisitions of all time (HP sold Autonomy in 2016 as part of a broader deal of software assets valued at $8.8 billion).

In the networking space, HP (and more recently HPE) has tried multiple times over the last two decades to emerge as a leading vendor. The Juniper deal is the latest attempt and by dollars alone, the biggest foray yet as HPE.

The early years: HP has been in networking since 1979

One of the earliest instantiations of HP's networking ambitions was the company's HP ProCurve division which got its start back in 1979, though it wasn't formally branded as ProCurve until 1998.

ProCurve developed networking technologies for enterprise networks and to a lesser degree carrier networks. In the early days, expansion into wireless networking came via both internal development and acquisitions, including the acquisition of Wi-Fi pioneer Colubris in 2008.

The big move for HP Procurve networking came in 2010, when the company acquired 3Com for $2.7 billion. At the time, the 3Com acquisition was a big deal that was designed to position HP to be a much bigger player than it was in the networking space. Much like the case with the new Juniper deal, executive management from 3Com came over to lead a revamped HP networking business unit.

The 3Com deal dramatically expanded HP's networking capabilities with core networking switch capabilities and enabling an edge-to-core networking portfolio.

Aruba is not just a vacation destination, it's an HPE networking stepping stone

Just five years after acquiring 3Com, HP acquired Aruba Networks in 2015 for $2.7 billion.

Once again, HP execs proclaimed the company's focus on networking and again leadership and execs from the acquired company came into the HP fold to bring their views, insights and expertise.

When HP acquired Aruba Networks, Aruba was predominantly a wireless networking vendor, with limited wired switching assets. Over the last several years, Aruba has become the cornerstone of the HPE (HP and HPE split in 2015) networking business unit.

In the Juniper acquisition press conference, HPE CEO Antonio Neri said that there have been a lot of learnings from the acquisition of Aruba Networks.

“I will argue it was a significant success,” Neri said. “Look at the run rate for the business, when I integrated the HPE networking business into Aruba it was approximately $1.7 billion and today at the end of 2023 it was $5.3 billion. We have grown our business dramatically.”

HPE has been growing Aruba Networking on multiple fronts, including cloud and private networking. Part of that growth has also come via incremental acquisitions. One such acquisition was 5G private network vendor Athonet in March 2023. Aruba had not had much in the way of private 5G, which is an area of growing demand and interest for enterprise customers.

How the Juniper deal is the same, yet different

The Juniper deal is by the numbers, the largest HP (or HPE) networking deal ever. But it will follow a familiar pattern to HPEs other networking acquisitions over the last several decades.

As was the case with 3Com and to a lesser extent Aruba Networks, there is some limited overlap in the existing portfolios of Juniper and HPE Networking. Both companies have ethernet switching capabilities, wireless networking and security. As was the case with the earlier acquisitions, the acquired company (in this case Juniper) has multiple assets that HPE really doesn't have. Juniper has a strong core networking and carrier portfolio and its AI assets arguably are vastly superior to what HPE's current portfolio includes.

Of note, Juniper has also grown via acquisition and its AI networking capabilities largely come from its Mist technologies, which were acquired in 2019 for $405 million.

As was the case with the other networking acquisitions, HPE is claiming it is now a leading networking vendor. With Juniper, however, it could be the leader it has always claimed and wanted to be.

“We are changing the networking industry,” Neri said in the press conference with media. “Like I always say, when I play soccer. If I'm not going to win, I'm gonna pick a fight, but fundamentally, we want to be number one in everything we do and we have an opportunity to do so.”