Juniper Networks managed to show year-over-year growth for its latest fiscal quarter, but momentum has stagnated alongside growing concerns over its pending $14 billion acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Juniper’s financials showed strong year-over-year growth in revenues and net income, boosted by what CEO Rami Rahim noted in a statement was a 40% surge in product orders. That growth was also attributed to the vendor’s ongoing focus on artificial intelligence (AI).

“We continued to see particularly robust demand from our cloud customers, which are investing to support AI initiatives that are driving meaningful data center and wide area networking opportunities, many of which remain in the early innings,” Rahim wrote. “This strength is being complemented by accelerated enterprise momentum, where we experienced healthy order growth across both campus and data center use cases. Based on the strong execution of our teams, and the demand signals we are seeing in the market, I remain confident in our growth prospects and ability to navigate current market conditions.”

Rahim’s confidence was somewhat offset by a sequential slowdown in results. Juniper’s net revenues were 9% from the previous quarter, with net income down a more substantial 32% sequentially.

Juniper is continuing to not host quarterly earnings calls tied to the pending HPE acquisition.

Is HPE casting a shadow over Juniper?

This slowdown comes under the shadow of growing concern over the outcome of HPE’s acquisition attempt. That deal was initially expected to close earlier this year, but is now undergoing a legal challenge from the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Rahim told SDxCentral following its previous earnings release that despite the challenge the vendor remained focused on operations.

“We haven't skipped a beat at Juniper as we go through this process, you can see it in our results,” Rahim said. “We're performing exceptionally well as a standalone company, but I am a firm believer that we will be an even stronger company when this deal is cleared and we become part of the HPE family. And then once that happens, I'm excited to partner up with Antonio to head up the combined networking business and to double down on the innovation that's happening both in the space of AI for networks and networks for AI.”

While Rahim remains understandably enthusiastic, many have noted operational challenges.

Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord told investors during that vendor’s latest earnings call that they were seeing Juniper struggle in the market.

“We've seen Juniper get a little more aggressive in pricing to win business,” Meyercord said. “They're somewhat in the same situation as HPE because they're stagnant. They can't provide real guidance to the channel or customers as to the future of the product roadmap, the technology, the solutions. They just they don't know.”

Cisco CFO Scott Herren made a similar comment last year during an earnings call, stating “I think for sure that’s created just a degree of uncertainty and a question of, hey, should I consider if I was previously a vendor or a customer of either of those, now is the time to kind of open up and look at other opportunities.”

Forrester Research Principal Analyst Andre Kindness had previously told SDxCentral that enterprises are indeed nervous.

“I've had customers put things on hold right now, and not just the Juniper side but both sides,” Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said in an interview with SDxCentral about how Juniper and HPE customers are reacting to uncertainty around the deal. “Typically, if customers are strong enough to look outside of Cisco and they're not a Cisco shop, then HPE, Aruba, Juniper are the primary ones that they’re looking at. I’ve had customers put some of that on hold at this point.”

Despite the drama, Juniper Networks continues to bolster its operational position and does remain one of the dominant players in what analysts note is a growing market.

Dell’Oro Group recently forecast that the “public cloud-managed campus switch and WLAN” markets will grow at a double-digit percentage rate over the next three years. The firm ranks Cisco, Juniper, and Extreme as the top players in that space, though added that HPE’s “cloud-managed offer has grown faster than the market, and the company’s pace of development seems unaffected by the pending lawsuit aiming to prevent HPE’s acquisition of Juniper.”

Gartner also recently ranked Juniper as a market leader in its latest data center switching “Magic Quadrant” report, sitting alongside rivals Cisco, Arista Networks, and Huawei. The analyst firm did, however, cite customer concerns over the pending deal and “the uncertainty it creates.”

HPE, for its part, is also showing signs of stress. The vendor announced plans to slash approximately 2,500 jobs over the next 18 months in what CEO Antonio Neri said “will better align our cost structure to our business mix and long-term strategy.”

This came after HPE posted sluggish earnings, with Neri flatly stating, “we could have executed better.”

More pressing for Neri have been reports that his job could be at stake.