Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) pending Juniper Networks acquisition might stir the pot in the secure access service edge (SASE) domain. As HPE aims to integrate Juniper Networks into its fold, questions loom regarding the future of Juniper’s SASE portfolio and how HPE's existing single-vendor SASE solution with SD-WAN from Aruba Networking and security services edge (SSE) from Axis Security will play roles in its strategy post-acquisition.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri and Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim have expressed their commitment to maintaining and enhancing the combined product and service offerings after the acquisition. They both said the goal of this acquisition is not to “eliminate products” from either portfolio but to “offer enhanced choice.”

However, HPE and Juniper Networks appear to have obvious overlap in their SASE product lines, with both offering SD-WAN and SSE solutions. “Both vendors got into SASE through acquisitions over the last three to five years,” Mauricio Sanchez, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group, told SDxCentral.

HPE Aruba is already a single-vendor player in the SASE market, having acquired SSE provider Axis Security last year to integrate with its SD-WAN offerings that were, in turn, based on Aruba’s Silver Peak acquisition. Aruba’s SD-WAN also integrates with almost all of the major SSE vendors for multivendor SASE, including Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Netskope, Zscaler and Check Point. HPE Aruba Networking Central is the vendor’s cloud-based network management platform.

On the other hand, Juniper's full-stack SASE platform features products like Juniper Security Director Cloud for policy management, Juniper Secure Edge for SSE, and Juniper Session Smart Router for SD-WAN functions (which was based on the acquisition of 128 Technology). It offers “a small SSE based on organic and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) technology,” Sanchez said.

Juniper was named as a niche player in Gartner’s first-ever Magic Quadrant for single-vendor SASE report and HPE Aruba was an honorable mention.

The SASE reconciliation should be straightforward

According to Dell’Oro Group’s SASE report for Q3 2023, HPE was the 10th largest SASE vendor by revenue and its business was nearly four times larger than Juniper’s SASE business, which occupied the 18th revenue position.

“The overlap in SASE should be straightforward to reconcile since HPE has a much larger business than Juniper,” Sanchez wrote in a blog post.

“I think one possibility here is that when it comes to SASE, it would be biased in favor of the [existing] HPE solution; and to migrate Juniper customers over time to the HPE solution,” he told SDxCentral, adding that HPE Aruba’s existing SASE solution has been accelerating faster compared to Juniper. “At least the momentum right now favors the HPE solution.”

HPE needs to make some hard choices, Sanchez said. “While they could keep both products alive, I would think that just given the small market share that necessarily wouldn't be economically effective for the firm.”

He argued that continuing all SASE products and the overlap “would be a definition of a bundling disintegration.” It would be “very confusing” for the customers as well. “Just pick the stronger one and stop the one with a smaller market share, so that there's clarity to customers about which one they should pick and go with for the long term.”

HPE and Juniper may face substantial challenges in SASE integration

Forrester analysts concurred there would be challenges if HPE and Juniper Networks tried to integrate their SASE components into a single, unified solution.

“I think for now, there's no way they're gonna operate as a single unit. I don't see that happening,” Forrester senior analyst Carlos Rivera told SDxCentral.

He pointed out it’s a slow and painful process from a consumer’s perspective for some networking vendors to integrate their security acquisitions. HPE and Juniper “run into that risk that most of the other networking vendors are doing, which is they have now acquired security capabilities through acquisitions, but the integration is very flawed.”

Given that HPE only recently acquired Axis Security for SSE and is still in the integration process, Rivera worries that it would be challenging for HPE to integrate Juniper's SASE portfolio into its ecosystem.

“We had looked at them from a SASE/SD-WAN perspective over the last six months. Both companies were challenged that they didn’t have all the pieces and components in there and they weren't well integrated,” Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester, told SDxCentral.

“Integrating all the pieces together, it's gonna be a long, long, long journey for them because they got to worry about the switching and the access points. And that's multibillion dollars compared to their SD-WAN, SASE side of the business,” Kindness said.

The combined SASE solution may not dethrone the top 3 vendors

Failing to integrate the SASE components into a unified solution might make HPE and Juniper fall further behind in the market, analysts noted.

“The two of them coming together, I don't think improves the position of it, because then they had just more pieces that they haven't integrated together and there seems to be holes in there and it's hard to get to that,” he added.

The SASE market is highly competitive, with leading players like Zscaler, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom and Fortinet.

“In the near term I don't perceive that the next couple of years, the new HPE plus Juniper is going to become a top three SASE vendor,” Sanchez said, adding “they may get closer to the top five” with the advantage of the ability to extend SSE architecture into the campus environment.