Hewlett Packard is currently negotiating a deal to buy out Juniper Networks for approximately 13 billion dollars.
I’m not a fan of HP, and have concerns about what they would do to Junipers IP once they got it. HP took a dive once Carly Fiorina got ahold of it, it hasn’t gotten better IMO.
The result will be fairly clear… They will take out the best portions of both networking companies and combine them into the one with the strongest name (probably Juniper). Cut a bunch of the good stuff away (like the free training), and sell devices. If it doesn’t turn a profit in the next couple of years, they will sell off or close the parts that don’t work, and keep the rest.
They want Juniper for some specific IP that they feel they need, or that they no longer want to license. Buy the IP and stop the licensing, then throw away the rest. A tried and true method to get what you want, and screw the rest of us.
In the end, I seriously doubt that this will make Juniper a stronger company. I hope I’m wrong, but history shows this is a strong bet.
I would argue they are already profitable. Net rev for 2023 was $5.6B and HPE paid $14B in cash. They could leave it as is and break even in 2.5 years.
Also, it looks like they bought Juniper to accelerate their AI efforts.
Hopefully they won’t change anything, prices on switches were right in the ballpark which is less than HPE sells their brand. I compared HPE, Extreme, and Juniper access level switches a couple years ago and the Extreme and Juniper were very similar. The HPE stuff seemed to be a tier above what I needed, and priced a tier above.
Now what could be shocking is if HPE decided to allow firmware upgrades without a contract, that would be a nice step forward for homelab users and small businesses. We pay a small fortune for all of our Extreme contracts, I forget what percentage it was, but it was $1.5 million for our campus upgrade and a large chunk was support contracts.
Being profitable and making good products aren’t necessary married to each other as concepts. Look at ubiquiti for example, arguably a very profitable company but they are a dumpster fire in terms of internal organization and product stability. Dev teams get reshuffled or fired, features that should have stayed around disappear seemingly at random, products & lines of products that are or were good get discontinued (sometimes before they even fully launch). The end products are usable but very unpredictable as to what will happen to their functionality during the life cycle of the product or product line.