Just five months after finalising its high-profile acquisition of Juniper Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise(HPE) is demonstratively proving that it has no intention of wasting time on lengthy merger processes. At the Discover Barcelona 2025 conference, the company unveiled its cards, presenting a unified network strategy. The giant’s main goal is to move beyond traditional infrastructure management towards fully autonomous networks, driven by the integrated artificial intelligence mechanisms of both companies.
A key element of the new offering is the deep integration of the Aruba Networking Central and Juniper Mist platforms. Rather than maintaining two separate entities, HPE is creating a common operational structure of AIOps. In practice, this means that the Large Experience Model (LEM) from Juniper, trained on billions of data points, will now power Aruba’s analytics. In the other direction, Aruba’s Agentic Mesh technology will support Mista with deeper pattern recognition. For CIOs and channel partners, this signals that HPE is moving towards a model where the network not only reports errors, but fixes them itself before they affect the end user.
HPE’s ambitions go beyond software, however. The company is launching dedicated hardware for demanding AI workloads. The new QFX5250 switch, which is liquid-cooled and offers a throughput of 102.4 Tbps, is a direct response to the growing demand from data centres building ‘AI factories’. Completing the portfolio is the MX301 edge router, designed to process inference traffic closer to the data source. This move, combined with the expansion of the partnership with Nvidia, positions HPE as a provider of a complete backbone for artificial intelligence infrastructure, capable of supporting distributed computing clusters.
The entire ecosystem is tied together by the OpsRamp platform, which is designed to act as a nerve centre, integrating signals from servers, storage and networking into a single management view. To accelerate adoption of these solutions in the partner channel, HPE Financial Services has launched aggressive financing programmes, including a zero interest rate option for AIOps licences. The speed with which HPE is combining Aruba and Juniper technologies suggests a determination to dominate the hybrid IT market before competitors have time to react to the new balance of power.
