HPE CEO Neri highlights first fruits of Juniper takeover

A decade after HPE embarked on its solo journey following the separation of the former HP into two companies, CEO Antonio Neri took the stage at its major annual European event, held December 3-4 in Barcelona. Neri shared HPE’s roadmap, which is centered on three technological pillars: networking, cloud and artificial intelligence.

“I am very proud of what we have accomplished together over the past decade, and even more excited about what is to come,” Neri said in his remarks to the audience of 6,000 people at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025.

HPE’s three-pillared focus is designed to respond to the major IT challenges facing organizations today, which according to Neri include dealing with legacy infrastructure, the need for data sovereignty, managing ever-increasing costs, and meeting the high computing demands brought about by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Advances in networking —accelerated by the absorption last July of Juniper Networks — were prominently on display at the Barcelona meeting.

Rami Rahim, formerly CEO of Juniper and now general manager of HPE’s networking business, attended the event and highlighted the first technological fruits of the merger: the integration of new AI operations capabilities in the network management platforms of both organizations and the presentation of common hardware.

“Networks have never been more important than they are now,” Rahim said, explaining that the goal of these “is no longer just connectivity per se, but self-management” and “that they are configured, optimized and fixed autonomously.” Networks, he added, that are “designed specifically with AI, but also for AI, and that can manage the rapid growth of connected devices, complex environments and increasing security threats.”

“Rami’s intention and mine has always been to create a new leader in networking,” the HPE CEO said. Neri noted that just five months after the Juniper purchase, HPE is already offering connectivity solutions to the market that combine the technology of its one-time rival and that of its solutions from Aruba, which HP acquired in 2015. “In the future, you won’t notice what each other is doing. And the fact that we already support the underlying dual design is just a testament to how fast the teams are coming together and obviously also all the innovations, where HPE’s advantages are already being leveraged,” Neri added.

HPE.

HPE’s acquisition of Juniper, a complicated deal

HPE’s acquisition of Juniper, worth a whopping $14 billion, has not been a straightforward process but rather a complex and lengthy one. Announced in January 2024, the purchase was not completed until July 2025. Nor has it been free of controversy, especially in the United States, where the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit to block the purchase, alleging that the merger would reduce competition in the networking equipment market, specifically in the area of wireless local area networks (WLAN).

Asked by COMPUTERWORLD ESPAÑA about the difficulties that HPE has experienced in the approval of the operation and about the critical voices that still exist in the US regarding this merger, Neri recalled, first of all, that “the transaction was approved outside the United States within a normal period, I would say, of six months. In the summer of 2024, there were only three countries left to approve it, and two of these three would do so in the next three months.” What happened in the US, he added, “is that there was an election and a change of Administration, after which we went ahead with the process.”

In analyzing the case, Neri continued: “The U.S. Department of Justice felt that in the campus and branch office market, particularly in wireless, there were going to be two [players] instead of three; but the reality is that this market is seven or eight. If you look at the U.S., you have Cisco, Juniper, HPE, Cambium Networks, Ubiquity and Arista. They all compete in the market. And, depending on the industry, some are stronger than others; it’s also a different story if you’re talking about large enterprises or the public sector. The market share that many of you [journalists] report on supports that the market is large and that there is fragmentation.” In the end, he added, with the U.S. Department of Justice, “we went through a constructive process, which ultimately was best for both of us. We demonstrated that this revenue space is a pro-competitive environment. And I have to say, during the ‘two million process,’ which is the final step [to notify large mergers and acquisitions] in the U.S., we received no complaints from customers and none from competitors.”

AI and cloud in the spotlight

In Barcelona, Neri also highlighted the technological advances made in recent months by HPE in cloud and artificial intelligence, technologies that the executive sees as completely connected as “AI is the quintessential hybrid workload.” He defended Greenlake, the company’s hybrid cloud platform that was originally born as a pay-per-use model and which currently has 46,000 customers worldwide; there are plans to add AI innovations, such as the incorporation of a framework based on autonomous agents (Greenlake Intelligence), presented by HPE last June and which is designed to automate and simplify IT operations in hybrid cloud environments. “The future of IT operations simplification is here,” Neri noted.

Neri also highlighted the relevance of HPE’s Air-gapped Private Cloud proposition, especially in a highly regulated environment such as the EU, and particularly in strategic sectors where data is especially sensitive such as the military.

The executive made special mention of a solution presented in Barcelona: the first AMD ‘Helios’ rack-scale AI architecture with integrated Ethernet networking. This solution, he explained, combines connectivity hardware and software from Juniper and Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 networking chip, “capable of supporting trillion-parameter model training traffic, high inference rates and massive model sizes,” which is supplied by HPE’s services team.

In addition, Neri boasted about HPE’s strong position in the supercomputing arena, a milestone helped by its purchase of the iconic Cray company, which specializes in this area, in 2019.

“HPE has built six of the largest supercomputers in the world and is a world leader in this field,” said Neri. He acknowledged that “in this period of unprecedented growth of AI, not all companies need a supercomputer to handle this technology, although they do need a secure stack.” This need is addressed by the converged infrastructure solution developed with Nvidia (HPE Private Cloud AI) to enable its customers to accelerate the development and deployment of generative AI applications in private cloud environments, which “responds to all legal data requirements” and to the great challenges of innovation in AI, “time, cost and risk,” Neri said. An offering to which, in addition, HPE has just added new high-performance networking solutions together with Nvidia and AMD to accelerate AI deployments, the CEO revealed in Barcelona.

Focus on organic and inorganic growth

According to forecasts the company released last September during its fiscal Q3 earnings report, the HPE team estimates revenue growth for its fiscal year 2025 (ended Oct. 31) of between 14% and 16% in constant currency. In its fiscal year 2024, the multinational had revenue of $30.1 billion, up 3.4% from 2023.

During Neri’s leadership, the technology company has made 35 acquisitions, as he himself recalled at a press conference in Barcelona. In addition to the aforementioned Juniper Networks and Cray, highlights include SD-WAN company Silver Peak, bought in 2020; data protection and disaster recovery firm Zerto, absorbed in 2021; security and IT operations players Axis Security and OpsRamp, added in 2023; and hybrid cloud management company Morpheus Data, bought in 2024.

“We are looking for selected assets that are complementary to our portfolio and will allow us to scale to our target. And they have to make sense in terms of revenue and earnings, but at the same time, bring value to our shareholders,” the CEO said.