The latest financial report from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) saw $9.7 billion in revenue for the firm in the quarter, a 14% increase year-over-year (YoY) with the company already seeing gains from its Juniper Networks acquisition.

HPE’s fourth quarter results for 2025 mark the first full quarter of revenue recognition since the Juniper’s deal close in July, with CFO Marie Myers reporting “initial synergies” between the two firms driving higher margin and higher growth opportunities for the firm.

Juniper reported $1.28 billion in revenues for its last independent quarter suggesting some part to play in HPE's $1.68 billion sequential earnings bump.

This played out against $7.5 billion in non-GAAP operating expenses incurred during the latest quarter, which was an 11% year-over-year increase that partly reflected Juniper’s integration.

While HPE’s earnings per share of 62 cents were nearly 7% higher than previous guidance, the firm missed its forecasted revenue of $9.9 billion by 2%. This was put down to timing of AI server shipments during the quarter alongside lower-than-expected U.S. federal spending due to the recent government shutdown.

“In regard to the push-out of the deals, some are government-related," HPE CEO Antonio Neri explained during the earnings call. "They take time to really get the machine up and running again. Remember, we’re just now a handful of weeks here since they came back online."

Juniper jubilance in Spain

The earnings came in the wake of HPE’s flagship European event, Discover Barcelona 2025. The conference was defined by the Juniper Networks integration, both in product line terms and the merging between Juniper and HPE.

In terms of the former aspect, those new products included the HPE Juniper Networking QFX5250, a liquid-cooled Ethernet switch touted for its fanless design, thus offering power consumption gains.

Another product, the HPE Juniper Networking MX301 multiservice edge router, was described as HPE’s most compact edge router, completing the edge on-ramp in its portfolio, with its small-form-factor platform enabling efficient connections into the broader AI grid and high-capacity core.

In conversation with SDxCentral regarding the latter issue of the merger, HPE Networking EMEA CTO Dobias Van Ingen recognized that while “customers are scared” by nature when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, Juniper’s wares are a natural fit into HPE’s restructuring into four pillars: campus and branch, data center, routing, and security.

“That means that [leaders of each segment] need to make the right decision for the whole customer base and their customer set. … Then the go-to-market will be enterprise, service providers, and everybody can sell and operate. I think that's pretty smart organization," Van Ingen said.

“From a product perspective, customers also care whether you are going to end sales of some products, and I think we have been clear: we move forward with everything, and everything will leverage from what we are currently doing," the regional executive added.

Rami Rahim, EVP of HPE Networking and former CEO at Juniper Networks, gave the Stateside view at a press conference during Discover Barcelona, which was that of perhaps dubious curiosity about what advantages the merger would bring to customers.

“Many customers are very curious about what we're going to do differently as a combined organization: ‘what are you going to do for me today that you could not have done as separate companies?’”

Rahim pointed to the Barcelona announcements as the answer, highlighting HPE’s commercial deployment of an AMD Helios-based AI rack-scale system as the “perfect example of working across organizational boundaries to create really amazing, compelling value-added solutions for our customers.”

HPE Networking SVP and GM Praveen Jain added that HPE's Helios deployment was made possible by following the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud Foundation (SONiC) open standards, with Discover Barcelona also unveiling SONiC compatibility on HPE’s QFX5240 and QFX5250 liquid-cooled Ethernet switches.

This compatibility was touted by both Pravin and Rahim as leveraging Juniper’s AIOps capabilities via Mist, enhancing microsecond-level visibility on the switches for network monitoring.

Virtual value

The software-defined boon Juniper has reportedly brought to HPE via its AIOps also extends to HPE’s software sales.

In HPE’s earnings call, Neri reminded investors that Juniper’s integration also brought in software subscriptions tied to products such as Mist and Apstra.

The CEO was also keen to underline software’s importance to revenue in the last quarter, pointing to GreenLake and its Morpheus VM Essentials virtual machine (VM) offering launched this spring.

Neri discussed in Barcelona recent challenges around rising virtualization costs, as well as rigid architectures, upcoming deadlines, and the tough adaptation of single vendor-based runtime models – without naming the VMware elephant in the room.

HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software was updated this week with full support for Kubernetes and containerized workloads on top of the hardware VM (HVM) hypervisor, while HPE Morpheus VM Essentials saw integration with Veeam's Data Platform v13 for hypervisor-based image-level backup and prompt recovery for VMs across private cloud environments.

Patrick Osborne, SVP and GM for cloud data Infrastructure at HPE Storage, pinned down what the virtualization strategy means.

Osborne said HPE’s focus spanned “the gamut of customer archetypes,” including smaller, mid-sized customers focused on total cost of ownership (TCO), and mid-sized and enterprise customers, “making some pretty impactful choices on how they're going to deploy applications.”

“And so they're looking at VME plus Morpheus enterprise for the control plane, and this whole solution plugs right into that,” Osborne said.

This puts HPE in a good position, perhaps, to scoop the small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) market that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan recently suggested weren’t worth Broadcom’s attention as it brings – or tries to bring – existing VMware customers to the cloud subscription model.

According to Osborne, the HPE market play is bolstered with partnerships such as those with Veeam and data management business Cohesity. This attention to data on the storage level shines a light on HPE’s refreshed push for data sovereignty, a running theme of the Barcelona event.

Osborne said sovereignty was a “huge topic” currently, with some customers either building sovereign clouds or siloed operations for either security or regulation components, leading HPE to offer its infrastructure by “essentially” providing GreenLake in an on-premises fashion.

Tim Pfaelzer, SVP and GM for EMEA at Veeam, said this use of HPE GreenLake on premises worked well with Veeam’s software, offering “complete sovereignty” for Veeam’s European customers, who are opting for a multicloud approach that includes HPE alongside hyperscale use, depending on the workload and its security parameters.

Sovereign AI clouds

In HPE’s view, the prize is lucrative sovereign AI cloud build out, which Neri said brings with it some precarious elements of the kind that have caused delay in AI server shipments – thus knocking HPE off its quarterly target.

“More than 60% of our orders are in sovereign and enterprise,” Neri said during the company’s earnings calls. “Obviously, enterprise is a very large number of deals that get through, but they are smaller in size compared to potentially a sovereign AI cloud [deployment], which obviously is much larger.

"The whole procurement process is much longer to get the funding locked and so forth. The data center readiness, the availability of power and cooling, and the like. And some of these deals, by the way, are not current technologies,” Neri added, before mentioning one deal was delayed to a data center not yet in situ.

“We deploy a number of pods, and those other pods will take a number of incremental weeks to get it done," Neri said. "So we expect that the back end of the year will have the biggest part of the AI revenue conversion.”

HPE's earnings also saw it raise the revenue forecast for its networking business to $11 billion.