Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has laid down a $14 billion offer to acquire Juniper Networks. This deal, as explained by HPE CEO Antonio Neri and Juniper CEO Rami Rahim, is not just about bolstering the networking and artificial intelligence (AI) focus, but also an indication of the two companies’ commitment to integrating security into the core of networking solutions.

Neri argues the security component is “a significant opportunity,” adding that “we're gonna deliver a secure unified network and experience with AI at the core of everything we do. And in that context, security is a core component.”

HPE has been placing an emphasis on security and aims to offer a universal security policy across all connection methods. “We have always prospered in the intersection of networking and security,” Larry Lunetta, VP of portfolio solutions marketing at HPE Aruba, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. “We are now very aggressively doubling down on the security side of our business.”

In addition to HPE Aruba’s on-premises network security services, the vendor recently acquired Axis Security, a security services edge (SSE) provider.

Neri noted the Juniper Networks deal brings together Juniper’s strengths in network security, including their SRX firewall offerings.

“The time acquisition of Axis Security plus our capabilities and as the one plus the SRX component that they have is an opportunity to cross-sell, upsell, but really give them a modern secure framework,” he said during a press and analyst conference.

Including the SRX next-generation firewall products, Juniper Networks’ Connected Security suite also offers threat prevention, threat intelligence and security analytics for both on-premise and cloud environments. Its security-related portfolio includes secure access service edge (SASE), public cloud security, threat detection and mitigation, zero trust data center, and service provider security, according to the vendor.

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim highlighted the acquisition will bring the opportunity to leverage security to enhance the competitiveness and comprehensiveness of their solutions.

“The combination again of our firewall technology, virtual security capabilities with this comprehensive data center either in traditional automated data centers or an AI cluster data centers can be a very powerful combination,” he said during the conference. “So security is a very big part of the competitive thesis here.”

Mauricio Sanchez, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group, echoed that Juniper Networks extends HPE's reach into the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), firewall and cloud workload security markets. Although Juniper's market share in network security is small compared to giants like Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks, it “brings a number of network security technology capabilities that HPE lacks.”