The much longer Bloomberg article is also worth reading for background,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-29/top-doj-a... ("Top DOJ Antitrust Officials Removed Over HPE-Juniper Settlement" (July 29))
> "Senate Democrats alleged the removals were the result of improper political influence and lawmakers are pushing the federal judge overseeing HPEās acquisition to hold a lengthy review of the antitrust settlement."
> "Roger Alford, the top deputy to the Justice Departmentās antitrust chief Gail Slater, and William Rinner, who led the departmentās merger enforcement, were dismissed Monday, according to people familiar with the situation."
Here is the archived Bloomberg article. If you want to edit this into your comment, no problem.
It sounds more like the US IC treats HP like one of its own departments, and it would very much like to do the same with Juniper.
The idea that even allies will be using US networking equipment in a couple decades seems implausible. Everyone is well-aware that any boxes coming out of the US are as likely to be tapped as ones coming out of china.
That has always been true, and yet almost every country buys both US or Chinese equipment, and a good many by both.
Maybe it's time we stop.
Sounds like a great idea; good luck with that.
Is there any computer or internet company that the US IC doesn't treat as their own department? Maybe some very small and insignificant ones.
The Snowden leaks showed 20 years ago that cisco routers were being sent to NSA for "aftermarket" modifications before being sent to clients. It's not news.
The Snowden leaks demonstrated Cisco wasn't a knowing participant ā the equipment was covertly diverted and then modified. That's quite different than knowing collaboration.
There are so many dead companies and technologies inside of HPE.
I fail to see how this impeded Huawei.
Just a reminder that Juniper was the firm that managed to (1) ship VPN appliances that used the Dual EC RNG, (2) get hacked, and (3) had the hackers substitute in their own Dual EC backdoor curve point, which shipped in their product for years.
I knew there must be a good reason for this push.
Rule #1 of digital security: There is always some spy, somewhere, trying to work an angle to get into your traffic. Absolutely no exceptions.
Rule #1.a.: Some part of your network is already compromised. You just don't know which part. Design everything with this in mind.
Itās easy for me to get worked about about the things being done and allowed by this administration, but I have to wonder: will allowing these mega companies create more opportunities for scrappy upstarts to disrupt these giant, slow moving, clunky monoliths?
Probably not.
Look at Juniper specifically. In 2021, their revenue roughly broke down as 40% service provider, 35% enterprise campuses, 25% cloud. In 2025, that had shifted to 45% enterprise campuses, 30% service provider, and 25% cloud. That shift is mostly reflected by how much money they pumped into Mist, and how successful that was.
Scrappy little upstarts have a _really_ hard time selling networking equipment to service providers and enterprises, who require tons of arcane features that take a long time to build and validate. They also operate very much on reputation, and rely on training pipelines outside of their own organizations (i.e., certifications). On the SP side (and the more modern enterprise side) there's also the significant issue of integration with other IT systems. At that scale, people aren't just command line jockeys that log into a router to provision something - Comcast can't operate like that, they need well defined API integrations with their provisioning system.
It is interesting and noteworthy that HPE's interest in Juniper is mostly due to the success of Mist, which _was_ a scrappy little upstart that got purchased by Juniper in 2019 (???). Mist (as a product line) only got successful once it was backed by Juniper, a known player. They had a much, much harder time selling to big accounts before that.
However, it's not a random scrappy little upstart, it got started by very senior people from Cisco that couldn't get their vision executed at Cisco. Specifically, Bob Friday (who co-founded Airespace in 2001, which was purchased by Cisco and directly led to Cisco wireless controllers), and Sujay Hajela, who was an SVP responsible for enterprise and wireless at Cisco, having led the Meraki purchase. More than a decade later, Meraki - another upstart, I guess - still isn't aimed at much other than SMB.
That Mist made it as an newcomer is the exception to the rule and entirely due to those very specific people and their very specific contacts. I wouldn't be surprised if at all if Mist had initially been fully intended to be a spin-out from Cisco with the express purpose of folding them back in a decade later if they were successful enough, and it just so happened that they got snagged up by Juniper first.
A nit here: leaving Cisco to do a product Cisco should do itself is literally part of the cultural DNA of Cisco; it's practically what you're supposed to do. In years of working with/around Cisco, I saw people literally do startups for things that were just planned features for existing Cisco products.
Completely agree, I expressed that poorly - that Mist didn't just get rolled back into Cisco seems like an aberration given Cisco's spin-out culture, and I'd be curious to find out some day what happened for them to get scooped up by Juniper instead.
"Normal" startups in this space that aren't just spin-outs designed to come back to the mothership if they're successful are incredibly rare.
Appreciate the insights; this segment of the industry is my forte so this was educational.
I realize itās impossible to predict what comes next, but Iām curious about analogs to this merger and what one could reasonably expect to happen over the next many years.
My philosophy is showing in that I donāt see these deals as good for competition or the market in general, so Iām (perhaps hopelessly) looking for the silver lining here.
Spot on about Mist (Mist AI). Great insight.
āWe need bigger companies so smaller ones have a chanceā is a weird take.
That wasnāt the take I was going for, but can see how it came off that way.
Iām opposed to these mega corps and looking (hoping) for some silver lining here that gives me some hope. Sibling comments have educated on that front.
Sure, and then the clunky monoliths buy the scrappy little disruptors and take them apart.
(Source: worked for a scrappy little disruptor that was bought out and cannibalized)
One way to avoid ācorporate raiders" and hostile takeovers is for companies to be owned by employees.
Maybe, but whatās to stop āscrappy upstartā from becoming the next HPE?
We need companies owned by the people that built the company. Not by the C-level executives that are appointed by a board of billionaire lackeys, bankers, trust fund kiddies who are hellbent on flipping a profit at all costs.
Also of course more regulation, and higher corporate tax. Get rid of the stock manipulation tactic known as stock buybacks that only encourage short term growth/pump in price of stock.
Hopefully after the merger Juniper will still be able to do things like lend equipment to events CCC.
Aruba has been pretty lackluster under HPE, so weāll see where Juniper takes them. Or is taken.
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