HPE’s acquisition of Juniper will drive the market for enterprise network-as-a-service (NaaS) platforms

HPE announced an agreement to acquire Juniper Networks (Juniper) for USD15 billion in January 2024. By acquiring Juniper, HPE joins a handful of vendors, including Cisco, Huawei and Nokia, that can claim to be assembling a full suite of enterprise networking components while also supporting IT infrastructure and capabilities (in the case of HPE, Cisco and Huawei). This group of vendors traditionally targets service providers, systems integrators and enterprises that want to build custom IT and/or networking platforms on which enterprises can run their businesses. However, they face increasing competition from public cloud providers. In response, these vendors are extending their portfolios of enterprise IT and network components, thereby giving them the opportunity to create end-to-end infrastructure-as-a-service platforms that can be offered using an opex model.