Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Antonio Neri during the vendor’s most recent earnings call continued to hold details of HPE’s highly anticipated Juniper integration close to the vest but did provide a few kernels of where HPE could drive value from that process.

Neri was peppered with questions regarding HPE’s Juniper integration plans, something that analysts have noted will be essential in order to garner maximum value from HPE’s $14 billion purchase. Neri danced around timing, reiterating previous comments that no customer would be left behind as part of the integration process.

Neri and Rami Rahim, who was Juniper CEO and is now president and GM of HPE’s Juniper-infused networking business, have both repeatedly noted a “thoughtful” integration process that reduces market disruptions.

“Our first integration priority is therefore to maintain continuity momentum across the traditional HPE, Aruba, and Juniper networking businesses,” Neri said during a call post-acquisition. “We are fully committed to supporting the lifecycle of existing products and protecting the investments our customers have made. No customer will be left behind.”

Neri during the latest earning call did add that Rahim would provide more details of that approach during an HPE investor meeting next month.

Integration interest, challenges

Interest in HPE’s in-progress integration was highlighted by the recent launch of AI networking updates tied to Juniper’s Mist and Marvis offerings. Jeff Aaron, VP of networking product and solution marketing at HPE, explained to SDxCentral that the updates had been in the works prior to the deal being approved, but that approval led to some reshuffling of product launch timelines.

Aaron explained that there was interest in finding any connection between these updates and HPE’s Aruba platform, but “it was a timing thing that it just didn’t make sense.”

“We were like, ‘all right, let's get this one out. It's important to our customers. It obviously shows that we're continuing innovation here,” Aaron said. “In the future you're going to see the announcements are going to be more correlated, and so that's on us. The timing of this one just didn't allow for that.”

This includes continued support for integrating Juniper’s Mist platform, “but obviously, now that we're one company, the goal is to figure out how to integrate that with the other side of the house and bring forward a solution that benefits all of our customers without leaving anyone behind.”

Neri had previously stated that the integration would also focus on "converging our cloud product roadmaps and integrate our go-to-market coverage strategies.”

“Over time we will align our offerings around a single, secure AI-native and cloud-native architecture, always guided by our commitment to customer-centric innovation,” Neri explained. “Importantly, HPE has no overlaps with Juniper solutions in routing, high-performing data center switching, and firewall security, all areas that will bring additional value to our customers. While there is some product-level overlap in our campus and branch portfolios, each company brings architectural strength that addresses the different customer segment needs, which expands our total addressable market.”

This was highlighted by Neri stating HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Juniper Networking would be go-forward product brands from the new HPE Networking business.

HPE sees opportunities

As for opportunities post-integration, Neri did point to the bolstered campus and branch business and the “AIOps layer” as central points of focus. This ties together cloud-based control over networking infrastructure that can better handle an increased in AI-generated traffic.

“When I think about the campus and branch question, we were very clear with Rami [that] we're going to hopefully integrate the Juniper platform and the Aruba central platform, because you need to think about that layer. Everything below that is very straightforward. There is no confusion,” Neri said. “Because the reality is that we have a very strong, robust campus switching portfolio, which obviously has a lot of that wired piece, which is Aruba silicon, then Wi-Fi access points. I don't think that's too complicated, and we're going to show what that looks like.”

Neri further noted extensions through HPE’s IoT and 5G businesses, “but that integration of the cloud and AIOps is where that experience will evolve.”

Neri also touted opportunities for HPE to grow its virtualization business in light of “rising costs” that market has seen over the past few years. This is based around HPE’s Morpheus VM Essentials platform for managing virtual machines (VMs) deployed across HPE’s VM Essentials KVM-based hypervisor and VMware hypervisors.

“We have an enormous amount of proof of concepts (PoC) going on with our Morpheus and VM Essentials,” Neri said. “What we really focus there is the conversion of PoCs to revenue.”

Neri had previously explained that the vendor’s VM management platform “gives an alternative to the VMware stuff, but at the same time it allows you to manage the VMware stack and other stacks.”

HPE’s Q3 numbers

From a financial perspective, HPE posted a 19% increase in revenues for Q3, which included one month of contributions from Juniper. Neri specifically pointed to strong growth in HPE’s AI networking and hybrid cloud businesses, with “AI orders” having doubled sequentially “driven by sovereign opportunities.”

Other noted growth areas included enterprise demand for campus and branch being driven by wired and wireless refresh orders, secure access service edge (SASE), and data center switching.

Neri during the call also noted that HPE attended to server pricing issues that impacted margins during the first half of its fiscal year. Those issues revolved around server pricing, discount strategy, and inventory management.

“We resolved those issues, and the traditional servers are back to historical levels, around 10 to 12%,” Neri said of that business.