Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) closing on its Juniper Networks acquisition sets up an intriguing battle in the enterprise wired and wireless LAN (WLAN) market, which recent analyst reports note remains dominated by Cisco but has innovation being driven by the newly enhanced HPE.

Gartner’s latest enterprise wired and WLAN Magic Quadrant report located both HPE and Juniper in the “leaders” category. Juniper did place furthest to the upper-right in that category, with HPE just a bit to the lower-left.

Gartner applauded Juniper’s AI-infused Mist and Marvis Mini systems as providing “constant insights” into enterprise operations, the vendor’s ongoing innovation focus, and “highly rated” customer support and technical teams. However, Juniper was dinged by concerns over the HPE integration, potential on-premises deployment challenges, and limited network-as-a-service (NaaS) pricing options.

HPE’s Aruba Network Central platform was lauded for easing enterprise deployment and management, AI integration, and security focus. Gartner did raise concerns over on-premises integration challenges, stated that HPE had too many NaaS pricing options, and also pointed to enterprise concerns over the Juniper integration.

Huawei and Fortinet were the only two other vendors Gartner placed in its leaders category.

Cisco was the lone tenant of the ranking’s “challengers” box, which was based on the vendor’s Catalyst on-premises and Meraki cloud-based management product lines.

As to be expected, Gartner positively cited Cisco’s broad wired and WLAN platform offerings, integrated security options, and unified licensing model for its access points. But, customers were cautioned about Cisco’s lack of overall market innovation compared to its peers and ongoing integration challenges between Catalyst and Meraki.

Those integration concerns have been highlighted by Cisco’s current corporate restructuring that is de-emphasizing its traditional networking base in favor of greater growth opportunities in the artificial intelligence (AI), security, and cloud arenas. These moves have borne out in the market where Cisco has reported strong growth from those new focus areas, but some customers have ripped out their legacy Cisco WLAN and campus networking deployments in favor of upstarts.

Despite that turmoil, Cisco’s leading market position remains a significant talking point. This includes being related to HPE’s delayed acquisition of Juniper.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) had filed a lawsuit against the proposed $14 billion deal, citing those two vendor’s WLAN market strengths. That lawsuit claimed a combination of those two vendors together with Cisco’s ongoing market dominance will concentrate too much WLAN gravity around potentially two outsized players.

Some questioned that reasoning, noting that a combined HPE and Juniper will only be a better rival against Cisco in this space.

HPE executives have quickly moved past the issue and are ready to take their newly enhanced platform offerings into battle.

“I am a technologist at heart and when I look at the opportunity here to combine technologies and teams to compete, not just with Cisco, but with this very vibrant, very competitive landscape, it's incredibly exhilarating to me,” Rami Rahim, who was formerly CEO at Juniper and is now president and GM of HPE’s networking business, said during a press briefing last week.

Market competition heating up

Rahim’s enthusiasm was backed by numbers from IDC that showed both HPE and Juniper out-growing Cisco in the enterprise WLAN market.

The IDC report found that Cisco generated $904.5 million in enterprise WLAN revenues during the first quarter of this year. That number was 4.6-percent higher than what Cisco posted during the same quarter of 2024, and accounted for nearly 40% of the enterprise WLAN market’s total revenues in Q1.

HPE was the next closest rival, gobbling up nearly $364 million in revenues in Q1, which equated to 15.9% of the market. While a distant No. 2 to Cisco, HPE did manage to grow revenues 10.7-percent year over year, which is more impressive considering reported customers concerns over HPE’s WLAN portfolio pending the Juniper acquisition.

Juniper sat at a more distant No. 5 in the market overall but did manage to grow its business nearly 22-percent year over year in Q1, hitting nearly $121 million in sales and a 5.3-percent market share. That is growth that similar to HPE managed to debunk concerns over deal-related market uncertainty.