BARCELONA – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) networking chief Rami Rahim claimed telecom remains a key priority for the firm, with operators able to save big using Greenlake as part of their HPE stack.

This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) was the first to showcase Juniper Networks under the HPE umbrella, as well as the first since HPE sold its remaining Telco Solutions assets to Indian systems integrator HCLTech.

In an exclusive interview held at MWC ahead of HPE’s Q1 2026 earnings this week, the former Juniper Networks CEO, now EVP for HPE Networking, stressed telecom has not been deemphasized by HPE, claiming in fact the opposite.

“This is an incredibly important customer segment for us," Rahim said. "I think our relevance due to the fact that we have just more technology building blocks to serve our telco customers has increased dramatically. Certainly Juniper brings all of the years of routing expertise for our telco customers, our data center operations, data center technologies, and so forth."

Rahim also pointed to the new opportunities for telecom in the AI era, highlighting its “beachfront property type real estate in the ideal network places where inferencing can exist.”

“Take a look at what many operators are talking about, the strategies that they want to deploy to capture new revenue streams through AI inferencing. We're no longer just an AI network infrastructure provider, we are a full stack AI infrastructure provider," he explained. "We've all the technology building blocks, all of the services, and the financial models to make it dead simple for any telecom operator that wants to, let's just say, gradually and with the lowest cost and effort, get into the AI learning and inferencing game at the edge.”

Rahim’s views reflected a common theme at MWC26, with communication service providers (CSPs) tempted to become “token tollsters” of sorts, a view also argued by HPE rival Cisco at the event.

Greenlake gives you greenbacks

The HPE president also highlighted operators who are constrained from a capex standpoint being able to tap into Greenlake to deploy their infrastructure from an opex footing.

"We have financial services that can make it easy for our customers to buy either using either capex or opex models. We have full suite services that can do, build, operate, and transfer type models for our customers,” Rahim said.

The company’s last earnings saw total company average recurring revenues (ARR) of $3.2 billion dollars, up 62% year over year, as driven primarily (80%) by the GreenLake platform and related as‑a‑service offerings, including Juniper Mist and Apstra subscriptions. Those results came off the back of the European leg of HPE Discover 2025, the first to be held since the closure of the Juniper acquisition, and which understandably showed off Juniper wares more than those in the Greenlake vein.

At MWC, Rahim pointed to increasing open and virtual radio access network (RAN) use cases as another Greenlake USP for telecommunications.

“As soon as you hear the word virtualization, the first thing that should come to mind is you need cloud infrastructure," Rahim said. "And the cloud infrastructure is the network, it's the compute, it's the storage, it's the software and the orchestration, the virtualization that ties it all together. So from that standpoint, it's absolutely what we're very good at. It's right up our alley.”

Self-driving networks and sovereignty

Aside from capex concerns, Rahim believes operators are also stifled by problems he sees as only solvable by autonomous networks, or, as HPE calls them, self-driving networks.

“AI is causing traffic to grow, but yet revenue is not growing as much as they would like, and so they need to keep the cost of network operations down," Rahim said. "In order to do that, they have to supplement the human effort in running a network day in day out with AI based tools."

“Telecom operators missed the cloud wave, and don't want to miss the AI wave,” he added.

Picking up on the sovereign thread line from HPE’s European event, Rahim also believes CSPs stand to gain from an “incredible” sovereign opportunity that’s been exacerbated by all things AI.

“AI is absolutely fueling a sovereignty discussion. There are many regulated industries and, of course, public sector that require a level of security and trust,” he argued. “You can have telecom operators leveraging one of the most important aspects of their infrastructure, the network, to build sovereign clouds and to offer them in very strategic locations for their end customers.

“Telcos, I think, are sitting on a golden opportunity, leveraging their network footprint, their network locations, basically transitioning their existing points of presence in the network into modern AI stacks that can allow them to tap into the same sovereignty opportunity."

HPE: past Juniper challenges and future

With dust from the Juniper acquisition settled, HPE’s earnings this week will mark its second full quarter of revenue recognition since the deal’s closure last July. Reflecting on the merger and acquisition, Rahim noted challenges around merging the two different companies’ IT stacks, which he said was helped along by cultural alignment between the two organizations.

Now that the smoke has cleared, HPE’s networking boss sees an opportunity for new investments on the horizon, with reports that HPE is doubling its sales team confirmed to SDxCentral by a company representative.

“So with any combination you're going to find that there are going to be areas of overlap that enable you to de-duplicate and invest in strategic areas. I mean, that's the power of scale, right?," Rahim said. “That's going to free up the capacity for us to go into invest in new areas that, in and of itself, allows us to double down in strategic directions for us without necessarily having to spend a lot more.”