MILAN – More than six months have passed since Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) finalized its $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks. When the acquisition closed, HPE said the combined networking division would account for more than half of the company's total operating income. The executive tasked with leading the combined division, however, anticipates that percentage will increase even further in the coming years.

Speaking during a press event in Milan, Italy, Rami Rahim, who was Juniper’s CEO before the acquisition and now president and GM of HPE Networking, said the business is anticipating more interest in networking as it serves as “the solid foundation of any digital transformation project,” adding: “All of the AI that's happening in the world today cannot happen without it.”

But in addition to networking technologies that emerged from the combined entity, like retail-focused networking gear and liquid-cooled Ethernet switches, HPE picked up Juniper’s right to supply networking equipment for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina – a little over half a year before the games kicked off.

HPE has a storied history of deployments for sporting events like the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team and last year’s Ryder Cup. But since this was initially a Juniper award, where did its new parent factor into the planning for the Olympics?

When probed on this by SDxCentral, Rahim said: “This was something that started before close, that's just normal business. There were a number of efforts, customer engagements, [and] projects that had started prior to close.”

Despite pre-planning and short lead time before the games post-closure, Rahim said efforts in Italy were a perfect example of how the integration of Juniper has been so far.

“Our No. 1 priority as we went through the closure process, No. 1 was do no harm; no customer shall feel any disruption whatsoever,” Rahim said. “Of course, we want to maintain the innovation engine. We want to maintain projects that are in flight. We want to then go and build this incredible, compelling joint roadmap. We've done all that. But I'm sure the Milan Cortina organizers will tell you, it has been a seamless process for them.”

And once closure was confirmed last July, the executive said the team behind the Winter Olympic network was able to “go even bigger with it.”

Networking's 'plumbing' era melted away

Beyond networks for sporting events like the Winter Olympics, Rahim was keen to emphasize how the converged HPE sits in terms of the AI hypecycle.

“Legacy networks do not cut it in the AI era; it's as simple as that. It's no longer about speeds and feeds,” Rahim said. “A network that is up is no longer necessarily a network that performs well, nowhere is that more true than in an environment like the Milan-Cortina Games.”

A veteran of the world of networking, Rahim told the gathered press that the advent of AI has definitively ended the era where networking was dismissed as mere "plumbing" or considered non-strategic.

“God, I hated those years,” he joked, adding: “Today I can squarely say that [networking] has never been more important every one of our customers. Whether they be service providers, cloud providers, enterprises that care deeply about building out their AI infrastructure, and digital transformation projects tapping into AI to advance their strategies, understands that they cannot do this without a robust, high-performance, high-experience network.”

AI is infused throughout the network deployed at the Winter Games, including “AI-native” networking automation capable of spotting issues and fixing them before they occur, while HPE Networking's Marvis assistant tool allows engineers supporting the games to troubleshoot using natural language.

Rahim said the infusion of AI across the network used at the Olympics was because operators “cannot just rely on humans to deliver an exceptional experience.”

“Humans cannot scale, measure on a per-second basis, whether everybody connected to the network is actually happy and experiencing something that's very positive," Rahim said. "The thing that we are going to set as an example for all future events is the leveraging of artificial intelligence to deliver that exceptional experience in real time to all stakeholders.”