In what should be a surprise to few, networking heavyweights Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Juniper Networks, and Cisco dominated the SDxCentral news cycle in 2025, with reasons both singular and intertwined.

HPE and Juniper’s attention-getting was linked to the former’s long-simmering $14 billion acquisition of the latter, which early in the year looked to be troubled, before gaining a quick – and some might say surprising – approval that seemed to catch many off guard.

Cisco’s attention was tied to the vendor’s sheer size, which means that every move it makes stirs the attention pot. This year’s spoons included layoffs, market competition, and customer wins.

Combined, analysts noted that those two major players jumbled the broader networking market and altering overall competitive dynamics.

Not to be outdone, Arista Networks took advantage of Broadcom’s refocused networking efforts to snag SD-WAN vendor VeloCloud, and Nvidia made a big Ethernet push.

With that, here are the top themes around the networking industry’s hottest topic from 2025.

HPE (eventually) gobbled up Juniper Networks

The most newsy networking news of the year had to be HPE finally closing on its $14 billion Juniper Networks acquisition.

That deal, which was announced way back in early 2024, exited last year with questions about its underlying reasoning and quickly devolved this year into chaos under the new presidential administration.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit toward stopping the deal, with the government’s stance based on the consolidated position of the market’s No. 2 and No. 3 players would hurt choice and innovation. It added that Juniper’s standalone market innovations have forced larger rival HPE to cut pricing and invest in its own innovations.

Chaos ensued as both sides dug into their respective arguments toward what was expected to be a tightly contested mid-year court battle.

However, just weeks prior to that expected event, both sides came to an abrupt agreement that on the public-facing side basically allowed HPE to close on the deal with the most minimum of conditions. The suddenness of that agreement seemed to catch at least one side of that simmering battle off guard.

HPE spent the second half of 2025 stumbling toward an integration plan that is only now starting to gain some clarity, leaving this story set to continue grabbing attention heading into 2026.

Cisco can’t quit networking, as cybersecurity struggles

Cisco entered 2025 riding a new organizational aim that shifted some focus away from its core networking operations toward a bigger focus on emerging cybersecurity, AI, and cloud opportunities. And while at least one of those did indeed show promise as the year progressed, networking remained Cisco’s operational driver.

For its fiscal year, which ended in the middle of calendar 2025, networking revenues increased 12% compared to the previous fiscal year. That growth accelerated as the year progressed, with Cisco’s most recent earnings showed a 15% year-over-year increase in networking revenues that CEO Chuck Robbins said was spread across “hyperscale infrastructure, enterprise routing, campus switching, wireless industrial IoT, and servers.”

“Within our campus networking portfolio, we are seeing very strong demand for switching, routing, and wireless products, indicating that enterprise customers are investing in the connectivity needed for AI deployments,” Robbins said.

That networking growth played alongside surging AI demand to overshadow Cisco’s struggling cybersecurity focus that has yet to build on the $28 billion Splunk acquisition from last year. Oh, and Cisco managed to cause what has seemingly become a seasonal endeavor by again slashing jobs, but also scored a somewhat unique customer win with AT&T.

Cisco and HPE-Juniper hit networking market dynamics

Despite its networking success, Cisco this year also showed a hilarious pettiness toward HPE.

Cisco’s market dominance had been a core piece of HPE’s argument in acquiring Juniper Networks. HPE’s management had repeatedly stated that the market needed a stronger No. 2 player to provide a competitive counterbalance against Cisco’s strength, a sentiment echoed by many industry analysts.

However, as noted previously, the DOJ’s lawsuit attempting to block the HPE-Juniper nuptial downplayed that notion and instead stated that a consolidated No. 2 and No. 3 would hurt market choice and innovation.

Cisco, smelling blood in the water, moved to tout market discontent.

Former CEO Scott Herren kicked off that offensive last year in telling an investor conference audience that the at-then pending deal was causing “uncertainty” in the enterprise WLAN market that could be benefit Cisco.

“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,” Herren said at that time. “And we’ve seen our wireless business, our orders greater than $1 million grew more than 20% in the fourth quarter.”

Mark Patterson, who has since replaced Herren, ramped that needling earlier this month at an investor conference that Cisco has been able to take advantage of continued market uncertainty emanating from HPE’s Juniper Network integration.

“I think that as HPE and Juniper come together they have a lot of overlap and probably their best performing space, which is wireless, so that's causing, I think, a lot of confusion with customers and what's going to happen there, and we've certainly been able to, I think, capitalize on that,” Patterson said.

Patterson then took it a step further by pointing at ongoing behind-the-scenes drama at HPE tied to investor discontent and the impact that could have on the vendor’s customer-facing operations.

This is based on HPE’s recent formation of a new board “strategy committee” created under pressure from activist investment firm Elliott Investment Management. The committee was formed from an agreement between Elliott and HPE’s board that included the hiring of industry veteran Robert Calderoni to head the committee, as well as Calderoni joining HPE’s Integration Committee that is working on the Juniper integration.

“You also look at just HPE has a lot going on in terms of activist pressures and cost pressures, and I think that they're probably at a place that will strain the amount of money that they can spend on innovation at perhaps the time when the innovation, I think, is probably the most critical,” Patterson said.

Sure, Patterson kept his remarks subtle, but just their mention in such a high-profile event showed a hopeful potential for more competitive fireworks down the road.

Arista Networks boosts its networking play

While HPE-Juniper and Cisco headlined networking biggest 2025 news, Arista Networks made a nice move of its own by snagging Broadcom’s unwanted VeloCloud SD-WAN operations. That deal bolstered Arista’s presence in the SD-WAN space and aligned with the vendor’s broader WLAN focus

Brendan Gibbs, area VP for Arista, explained that the acquisition itself was based on connectivity. Gibbs noted that while Arista has a robust stance in the data center and campus/branch networking space, “what we were lacking was something to really connect those branch centers to the campus headquarters, and that's where VeloCloud comes in.”

“VeloCloud brings best-in-class, industry leading connectivity to help bridge that gap, to bridge the connectivity gap that Arista had for connecting branch offices back to the campus headquarters,” Gibbs said.

This connectivity includes multiple options, “whether it's cloud WAN connectivity from a cloud provider, whether it's a managed service from embedded service provider, or it's just direct enterprise connectivity over some sort of direct internet links from their own do-it-yourself-type of approach, it brings a multiplicity of connectivity options,” Gibbs added.

That connectivity can plug into Arista’s campus switching products and Wi-Fi access points “for global SD-WAN and cloud WAN connectivity,” Gibbs said. “The VeloCloud edge solution really starts to be a perfect complement to the campus wired and wireless solutions that Arista has.”

Arista will also gain some continuity in the deal as VeloCloud co-founder Sanjay Uppal joined their executive team as GM and VP. Uppal was an early VeloCloud CEO before the firm was acquired by VMware, when he switched to various executive positions, changes that also continued when VMware was acquired by Broadcom.

Mauricio Sanchez, senior director for enterprise security and networking research at Dell’Oro Group, told SDxCentral that VeloCloud’ secure access service edge (SASE) angle could be a significant growth opportunity for Arista.

“It gets Arista one foot into the enterprise WAN landscape but they need to quickly decide do they want to play with what they have and just extract as much value out of the current technology that they have or do they want to commit to continue to expand their SD-WAN [market opportunity] to the full SASE [market opportunity]," Sanchez said. "Because right now, they only cover, let's just say 30% to 40% of the SASE opportunity, which that 30%, 40% is net new for Arista, but that means that there's another 60% to 70% that is still there for them to take home.”

That decision could mean another potential Arista acquisition in 2026, this time focused on cybersecurity or SSE.

“They need to have the conversations about, ‘well, are we going to be happy with the returns on just the constrained part of the market that we're going to go be able to go attack,’ or do they have the desire to go capture the flag at top of the hill and go all in by acquiring an SSSE vendor,” Sanchez said. “I don't think there's necessarily, near term, an easy answer for that. I think they need to really analyze what their appetite for risk and the expansion is.”

Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking engine

Nvidia was everywhere in 2025, and I mean that literally as it seemed you could not go to any industry or industry adjacent event and not see Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage.

But, Nvidia also made waves behind the scenes with its Ethernet-based Spectrum-X networking platform.

That initiative, unveiled on stage during the Computex 2024 event, has quietly become the plumbing that allows generative AI workloads to scale, re-engineering Ethernet to eliminate bottlenecks and overcome what Huang described last year as a history of being “designed for high average throughput."

Spectrum-X is an end-to-end accelerated networking platform designed to improve the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI clusters. The offering combines Nvidia’s networking hardware and software to power a networking platform specifically optimized for AI workloads.

It brings together the Spectrum SN5600 switches, part of Nvidia’s Spectrum-4 switch architecture, with Nvidia’s BlueField 3 data processing units (DPUs) to boost generative AI network performance by 1.6-times over traditional Ethernet fabrics. Spectrum-X also integrates network-level remote direct memory access (RDMA), which helps provide that performance boost, along with adaptive routing to significantly reduce packet congestion.

Nvidia started down the Spectrum-X road in 2019, when it beat the likes of Intel, Microsoft, and Xilinx to acquire Mellanox in a deal worth $6.9 billion.

The Israeli-American firm was a leading developer of interconnect networking technologies for data centers and high-performance computing (HPC). Having built a host of Ethernet-based switches prior to the purchase, many of the minds behind Mellanox’s offerings would later use their expertise to help craft Spectrum-X.

More importantly, Nvidia tapped into work with its quasi-proprietary InfiniBand networking platform to bolster Ethernet. This included implementing lossless networking to eliminate retransmission delays; creating adaptive routing that spreads traffic based on both local and global network conditions; and developing telemetry-based congestion control that prevents jobs from interfering with each other.

Basically, Nvidia’s team gave Ethernet the tools to challenge InfiniBand's dominance in AI networking, while leveraging the existing software ecosystems that enterprises had built around Ethernet infrastructure.

That innovation positioned Ethernet to challenge InfiniBand's crown as the AI back-end leader. As recently as 2023, InfiniBand held an 80% share of the AI back-end networks market. But recent Dell’Oro Group research suggests that increased interest in Ethernet-based offerings could drive nearly $80 billion in data center switch sales over the next five years.

IDC also noted that trend, with its recent ranking of Ethernet switch vendors showing Nvidia quickly gaining a significant share of the market.

A little over a year since its unveiling, Spectrum-X has quietly become the foundational plumbing for some of the world's most demanding AI workloads. The question isn't whether Spectrum-X itself will continue to evolve but instead is how the broader industry will adapt to the vision Nvidia’s founder outlined back in 2019 to make the data center a fundamental unit of AI computing, with networking as its critical backplane.