HPE Buys Juniper: Another Solid Company About to Be Gutted

Well, here we go again. HPE has wrapped up its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks (source). Predictably, the press release is packed with all the usual fluff — cloud-native, AI-driven, end-to-end secure portfolio, blah blah blah. We’ve heard this song before, and we know how it ends.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Everything HPE touches eventually turns into a slow-moving, bloated mess. Case in point: 3Com. That was once a respectable networking brand with a clear value proposition. HPE bought it, smothered it in bureaucracy, and drained the life out of it. What used to work well became a confused jumble of product lines no one wanted to deal with.

And if you think this is just HPE, look at what happened when Broadcom took over VMware. The promises were the same: efficiency, focus, synergy. What did customers actually get? Ridiculous price hikes, stripped-down support, and a slap in the face for those who relied on VMware’s ecosystem to run their business. Whole communities of customers and partners were left scrambling to rework roadmaps and escape the chaos. Sound familiar?

HPE claims this Juniper deal will double their networking business and create some kind of AI-fueled networking utopia. The reality? This is Broadcom-VMware all over again — except now it’s Juniper’s turn in the meat grinder. You can expect product confusion, price hikes, pointless integrations, and a mass exodus of the talent that actually made Juniper gear worth buying.

Juniper earned respect because their engineering spoke for itself — clean, elegant, and reliable. HPE will bury that under layers of corporate nonsense and kill what made it great. The decay starts now. The only question is how long it’ll take before customers start looking for the exit.