Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) pending $14 billion Juniper Networks acquisition continues its march toward a potential early 2025 closing, a conclusion that HPE management is banking on to help boost its lagging edge operations.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri noted during the vendor’s latest earnings call that the deal has received approval from regulators in the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom (UK), India, South Korea, and Australia, and that, “in the United States, we are engaged with the Department of Justice (DOJ), and we expect the review will continue in the coming into the new calendar year.”

HPE has reportedly been meeting with the DOJ in an attempt to garner approval of the deal.

Neri during the call did state that HPE was “working through the process.”

“We are confident this will close in the early part of 2025,” Neri said, adding, “and we are working very, very collaborative with the DOJ. So nothing gives me pause that would not happen.”

HPE had initially hoped to close the deal before year end, but that has now slipped into the new year.

Neri also made a point early in his prepared remarks to tout the deal’s national security benefits.

“This transaction will also strengthen U.S. National Security interests by advancing HPE's position as a strong U.S. innovator among global technology companies,” Neri said.

HPE is expecting a lot from Juniper

Beyond Neri’s nationalistic proclamations, the transaction will also strengthen HPE’s bottom line.

While HPE’s results were mostly upbeat, the vendor’s Intelligent Edge business continued to struggle. That division, which includes HPE’s secure access service edge (SASE) service, posted a 20% year-over-year drop in revenues that it attributed to digestion of excess inventory.

Neri countered that the unit did post its third consecutive quarter of order growth, “but you don't see yet fully translating into revenue, which looks more flattish.” HPE is banking on the Juniper deal tilting that trend as it will “further enhance our portfolio providing customers with complete edge-to-cloud solutions.”

“The one area has not yet fully returned to what we want to see is the campus switching itself,” Neri said. “And then … data center networking using more intelligent features that our [Aruba Central] platform brings to the table has had double-digit growth again. And so that's why I'm excited about the combination with Juniper Networks being complementarity to that portfolio.”

CFO Marie Myers added further color that “when we close Juniper, that is going to be a big driver and has a very positive impact on both gross and operating [margins]. We expect that 50% of operating profit going forward will come from Juniper.”

Analysts have expressed concern over HPE’s ability to take full advantage of Juniper Networks’ portfolio.

Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester Research, 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.”

Kindness more recently told SDxCentral in an interview that uncertainty is causing some enterprises to pause their purchase plans.

“I’ve had customers put things on hold right now, and not just the Juniper side but both sides,” Kindness said. “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.”

Neri has attempted to temper overlap concerns, 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.

Kindness did add 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.”

However, that does not mean opportunities for rivals won’t exist.

“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,” Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord said during that vendor’s recent earnings call.