Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has put in a $14 billion bid to acquire Juniper Networks in a move that HPE CEO Antonio Neri claimed will make HPE a networking powerhouse able to rival market heavyweight Cisco.

The all-cash deal is valued at $40 per Juniper share, which is a 32% premium over where Juniper’s shares had been trading prior to rumors of the deal surfaced. That value is a more significant 40% increase compared to where Juniper’s shares were trading last October after the vendor announced a corporate restructuring plan designed to stabilize operations. That plan also included approximately 440 job cuts.

HPE is funding the deal from financing commitments that will eventually be replaced by a combination of new debt, mandatory convertible preferred securities and cash on its balance sheet. The combination is expected to achieve $450 million in operating efficiencies and run-rate annual cost synergies within 36 months after the deal closes.

The deal has been approved by the boards for each company and is scheduled to close by early 2025. Juniper CEO Rami Rahim will move to head up the combined HPE networking business where he will report to Neri.

Neri during a press conference announcing the deal said the move will bolster HPE’s networking and artificial intelligence (AI) focus. That networking focus will be based on an expected doubling of HPE’s business in that segment, “creating a new networking leader.”

“HPE will be a new company where networking will be the core foundation of everything we do,” Neri said. “And together with Rami, which I'm really excited he's going to lead the new combined business, we're going to accelerate what we call an AI-driven agenda. And that will allow us to capture this massive inflection point.”

Neri added that the boosted networking focus will also take advantage of HPE’s GreenLake as-a-service model to be a more formidable opponent for market heavyweight Cisco.

“Let me be clear: What we're doing today with this proposed acquisition is to create a new core. The core is the network fabric by which we deliver hybrid cloud-native services with the rest of the portfolio we have, and we deliver all this unified experience to the same platform called HPE Greenlake, which is a true edge-to-cloud platform. That's the objective,” Neri said.

Neri added that instead of its core business inside Greenlake being mostly compute, now the platform is how it delivers an entire set of services," whether it's cloud-native or AI-native networking. [That] obviously gives us a significant control plane, and honestly will allow us to deliver a better experience for customers because the most difficult part of the architecture is that network.”

Neri also stated that the Juniper assets will further enhance its competitive position in the market.

“Like I always said when I play soccer, if I'm not going to win, I'm going to pick a fight,” Neri said when questioned about HPE’s ability to take on Cisco. “But fundamentally, we want to be No. 1 in everything we do. And we have an opportunity to do so.”