HPE Acquires Juniper Networks for $14B After Settling Antitrust Case

This week Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with America's Justice Department, "paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks," reported Telecoms.com: Under the agreement, HPE has agreed to divest its Instant On unit, which sells a range of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment for campus and branch deployments. It has also agreed to license Juniper's Mist AIOps source code — a software suite that enables AI-based network automation and management. HPE can live with that, since its primary motivation for buying Juniper is to improve its prospects in an IT networking market dominated by Cisco, where others like Arista and increasingly Nokia and Nvidia are also trying to make inroads.
And after receiving regulatory clearance, HPE "very quickly closed the deal..." reports The Motley Fool. "In the press release heralding the news, the buyer wrote that it "doubles the size of HPE's networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions." Investors were obviously happy about this, as according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence the company's stock price ballooned by nearly 16% across the week, largely on the news.... The Justice Department had alleged, in a lawsuit filed in January, that an HPE/Juniper tie-up would essentially result in a duopoly in networking equipment. It claimed that a beefed-up HPE and networking incumbent Cisco would hold more than 70% combined of the domestic market.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Re:I don't understand

[SvnLyrBrto]

Why would there be one? This looks like a bog-standard corporate acquisition with some kowtowing to trump. Skeezy for the latter, but I don't see any climate angle to Juniper's networking kit.

memristors?

[ndsurvivor]

I read a long time ago that HP was supposed to give us memristors. What happened to that? This is a troll comment, pay no attention to this poster.

So Much for FreeBSD

[jmccue]

Seems Junos Is based on FreeBSD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

I guess that will be moved to whatever HP uses for the OS.

Re:

[Burdell]

Juniper has been moving to Linux over time. They started with a lot of customizations in their FreeBSD that always made it hard for them to rebase to a new upsteam release and to support new hardware (like they had issues with PowerPC CPU SMP support, so the MX80 and MX104 had multiple cores but JUNOS only ever used one).

Instead they've been basing a lot on Linux (Wind River Linux distro IIRC). The move is two-fold: they've been running Linux on the hardware and their FreeBSD-derived JUNOS in a VM on a lot

Re:

[Shades72]

And you can only connect with legitimate SFP plugs from HP, and you'll have to get a subscription so, HP can send you a new plug, whenever they think your plug is not functional enough anymore. At cost, of course.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

I guess that will be moved to whatever HP uses for the OS.

I believe it's Linux with a custom shell. I know I can ssh into our HP switches, but you don't get a stock bash prompt or anything like that.

Re:

[Burdell]

I haven't touched an HP switch in an age, but a large chunk of the switch market is owned by Broadcom chips, and most of the vendors take the Broadcom reference OS (based on Linux) and just put their branding and spin on it. There's a Cisco IOS-ish CLI, and then some will let you access a little more of the under-the-hood Linux (like the FiberStore datacenter switches I've used recently have some level of python installed although I haven't messed with it).

Realtek has been getting a foothold at the lower en

What the fuck?!

[Nabeel_co]

This is crazy. HPE is just buying up all the networking companies and the DOJ is just OK with this?!

This is insane!

First Aruba and now Juniper.

This kind of concentration of power is what's wrong with Capitalism. This does nothing but reduces competition. Anyone who tells you capitalism is about free market competition, is an idiot. Capitalism is the antithesis of both free market and competition, because all capitalism does is breed monopolies that crush their competitors.

Re:What the fuck?!

[ndsurvivor]

There is no DOJ in my humble opinion, they are just Trumps lawyers now. A nation of and for Billionaires.

Re:

[sound+vision]

On the rare occasion they do something right - like blocking this merger - you can bet there's an ulterior motive. Now that the toll has been paid, they reveal they never actually cared about markets or competition, by letting the merger proceed.

I'm assuming a bribe has been paid, because they didn't extract any pledges to eliminate DEI, which the company pushes heavily. I have a hard time seeing the current CEO Neri announcing any kind of DEI rollback. I believe that's why he's being pushed out by big capi

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

When you hear DEI does it make you drool? To me that term is like saying n i gger. It is utter nonsense.

Re:

[Nabeel_co]

I mean, the DOJ's been fucking the dog for the last 25 years so while there's a lot to blame Trump over, I don't think this is one of those things.

He certainly won't help the situation though.

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

My perception is that the DOJ has been an independent and decent part of America in the last 25 years, enforcing laws, and doing decent things. How can our perceptions be so different?

Re:

[Nabeel_co]

I don't know how that can be your perception, when Google and Apple clearly need to be broken up, and have needed to be broken up for at least the last 5 years, if not more, and yet... nothing has been done.

and that's ignoring things like the T-Mobile merger, and all the other telecom problems that the US has, and we haven't even start to touch media companies yet...

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

I bend my knee to your point, I am thinking mostly of the corruption of Trump, and not to the corruption of the so called "tech bros".

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

The alternative is that Google, Fecebook, etc set things up for the US to be broken up.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Corporatism is a distinct concept from Capitalism. That's the one you're describing. There's been a psyop by Socialists to describe corporatism as capitalism so they get more of a merger of business and State (fascism).

Corporations are creations of a government in which governments get a cut and politicians get bribes in exchange for protection from justice for the corporate actors' crimes.

If you read Adam Smith he described this as Mercantilism in his time and recommended free market capitalism as its anti

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

Boil this shit down to a simple statement: Corporations are a belief system that can benefit many people if it is handled in a good way, but hell no, they are not "people". What the heck?

Re:

[Nabeel_co]

Sorry, this was always the final destination for Capitalism. To say "this isn't capitalism" like it somehow excuses the results of capitalism lacks wisdom.

By that logic, Communism would be a better method of governance than capitalism, because all the corrupt Communist regimes were put in place by capitalistic countries, and the non-corrupt ones were constantly undermined by capitalistic countries.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

This is crazy. HPE is just buying up all the networking companies and the DOJ is just OK with this?!

It's weird, I didn't see Antonio Neri listed as attending any of Trump's fundraising luncheons.

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

To me.... HP was almost the greatest company that was every created. The word: "Quality" still is a synonym of HP in my mind. I am glad that they are "running under the radar", as you pointed out. I do hope that the emerge on the other side as one of the Greatest Companies that America ever had.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

The HP you remember doesn't really exist anymore.

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

I know....... darn it! I still hold on to those memories where specifications meant something, and I could drop an HP device off of a rooftop, and it would still work.

Re:

[Shades72]

Capitalism isn't the problem here. The regulators allowing hyper-capitalism to exist, nay, thrive in the USA (but also globally)...that is the true problem. Who knew politicians (not just in the USA) are greedy little b.tches...

Re:

[ndsurvivor]

It is like no words work anymore when you say Capitalism is not the problem here. While I agree with that statement, I think that unfettered capitalism does not work. When I was a kid, I played Monopoly, and in that game it is all "winners", or "losers", we played that game. I guess Trump and Musk are the winners, and the rest of us just roll some dice, land on their property, and pay, and we pay, and we pay some more. Then we roll the dice again, and land on their property, and we pay again. Unfe