Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) newly acquired Juniper Networks rolled out a number of AI networking updates that further bolster its position in that increasingly important market segment and also highlights HPE’s ongoing integration challenge with its new prized possession.

Jeff Aaron, VP of networking product and solution marketing at HPE, explained that the trio of new updates revolve around Juniper’s long-standing AI work through its Mist and Marvis offerings.

The first is a new agentic troubleshooting integration into Marvis that uses generative AI to access Juniper’s own algorithms and data science designed to smooth workflows. This has also now been expanded into Juniper’s data center networking efforts, expanding what had been primarily available for its wired, wireless, and WAN connectivity models.

“We've had the ability to do cross-domain, but it's just gotten even better now that we're using agentic workflows and genAI troubleshooting,” Aaron said of this integration.

The second is the availability of synthetic testing within Juniper’s large experience model (LEM). This involves Juniper’s Marvis Minis feeding its own intelligence and data into a LEM that is receiving network performance insights from video communication platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Aaron noted that HPE views these video conferencing services as the “canary in the coal mine of the network, so if you can find and fix video problems, odds are most of your other applications are going to benefit from that and work pretty darn well.”

The third is an expansion of “self-driving actions” within the Marvis Actions dashboard that allows for a user to select a specific autonomous action and then track the results of that action. This feature is targeted at what Aaron said were most likely to be trusted to go into this self-driving mode.

Juniper’s update flow

The updates are the latest in a number of AI-focused moves by Juniper. The vendor just a few months back injected more intelligence into its AI networking platform to help better steer outcomes for overworked network managers.

However, these latest updates are the first from the Juniper side of the house to come out following the HPE acquisition.

Aaron explained that the updates had been in the works prior to the deal being approved. That approval led to some reshuffling of product launches, with this latest update initially planned for later this year.

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.”

The Mist updates are also significant as some predicted HPE would need to divest those assets in order to consummate the Juniper acquisition. Instead, HPE was only required to provide a pair of limited licenses for Juniper’s AI Ops for Mist source code and divest its Instant On wireless LAN (WLAN) campus and branch network switching business.

Importance of integration

The latest updates also come two months after HPE rolled out its own GreenLake Intelligence platform that basically acts as a planning agent that can intake insight from across the Greenlake platform of services – networking, servers, storage, software – or even third-party sources and parse out the relevant information to AI agents. These agents can then feed their insight through a model context protocol (MCP) to help manage various HPE services like its AI Essentials, HPE Virtualization, or Aruba network management.

Aaron explained that the plan will ultimately be to “tie in with that too.”

“It's a little bit new, so we got to figure out what that means, but with the agentic model things are in place to actually go and leverage that,” Aaron said of those still percolating plans.

Analysts have noted the need for HPE to quickly integrate its Juniper assets. Rivals have also been touting customer concerns over what the deal might mean for their legacy HPE and Juniper platforms.

HPE and Juniper executives during a post-acquisition call provided a high-level view on integration plans, but a minimal amount of real insight into long-term market plans.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri and Rami Rahim, who was Juniper CEO and is now president and GM of HPE’s Juniper-infused networking business, both repeatedly spoke of 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. “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.”

This priority will at some point cross paths with Neri’s second priority to “converge 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.

André Kindness, principal analyst for network serving infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research, told SDxCentral in an interview that the speed of this integration will be important in the market.

“Those two were dropping off – more so on the HPE side than the Juniper side,” Kindness said of conversations he was having with enterprises. “Juniper was doing a good job of rolling out new features or functionality and moving to bolster their lineup in case they weren’t going to combine, where HPE was a little quieter about anything. It just seemed customers on the HPE side were definitely more nervous than on the Juniper side. If the deal wasn't going to happen I think customers going down the Juniper route were comfortable because the company was still moving ahead on development and supporting their current and investing in new capabilities. But HPE customers, or people looking at that solution or refreshing, I'd say, the last two months have shown probably double the amount of anxiety.”