66. The DoJ Just Devalued Juniper Mist – Tech Field Day Podcast

It's an exciting time in the world of networking because the US Department of Justice has finally cleared the acquisition of Juniper by HPE. However, there are some conditions. One of them didn't really make the news.

One of them was all the news. In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, the DOJ just devalued missed. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of influential IT experts to discuss a single idea about key concepts in the enterprise IT industry.

This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, and is often recorded in association with one of our events. Tech Field Day is a part of the Futurum Group, and this podcast is also published on our sister company's website on Techstrong tv. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves, starting with Ed.

Hi, ed Whedon, uh, roaming packet engineer, uh, mostly focusing on routing and switching. Uh, Sam Clements. I am a mobility focused engineer.

I currently, uh, am employed over at ww t my day job, so this is not their opinion. This is mine. Uh, you can find me on Blue Sky at Samuel Clements.

Uh, hi, I'm Jake Snyder. I'm a wireless focused, uh, engineer at Google. This is also my opinion and not that of my employees.

And I am Tom Hollingsworth event lead here at Tech Field Day. And, uh, these are everybody's opinions as far as I'm concerned because this is, uh, gonna be a very contentious, uh, discussion today. So let's jump into the premise for today's episode.

You may have seen in the news that one of the big blockbuster acquisitions is happening in the networking and wireless space has finally been cleared by the Department of Justice. That's right. We're gonna be talking about HPE buying Juniper Networks.

This was announced in 2024, and it looked like it was going to be, um, you know, moving right along. But late in 2024, we started to hear rumors that potentially there was going to be some kind of, um, pause put on this. We did later find out that the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the acquisition, claiming that it would reduce competition in the market.

And as of the, uh, what was that? Uh, June the 28th, we received a notification from pretty much everybody that, uh, the Department of Justice had offered remedies for, uh, this particular acquisition. And as of the recording of this podcast on July the first 2025, the remedies have been proposed and accepted by HPE and Juniper, and we are waiting for an official judge's sign off for these to go forward.

That being said, the remedies have caused a lot of conversation in the industry. The premise for this episode is that the Department of Justice just devalued mist. Alright.

I know. I just, I threw that out there. Mm-hmm.

Because I know that people are just gonna light this up. So, so everybody understands one of the remedies that is proposed in the settlement. Well, there's one remedy that everybody just kind of shrugged their shoulders, which is that HP Aruba Networking must, uh, spin off their instant on, uh, access point technology, which is basically the controller list technology.

And everyone kind of went, eh, okay, fine. It's the other one that's causing the problem. Uh, and this is the, uh, auction of licensing for Juniper Mist for AI ops.

Uh, it's convoluted. Uh, we'll link to a couple of articles in the show notes that are gonna do a much better job of explaining this than I ever could. But effectively what they're saying is, you're not divesting yourself of missed AIOps, you just have to give other people the rights to buy it and use it and maybe rent some Juniper employees for a while.

With that being said, folks, help me make sense of this. What did the Department of Justice just, uh, do? It, it, it wasn't convoluted to begin with enough, right?

We had, uh, HPE that owns a Aruba and Juniper who owns Mist. And, and I think the writing was probably on the wall with the first response from HPE back to the Department of Justice when they literally said in writing, WWW what makes you think this is about us acquiring a wireless land company? Um, and, and so I think that we in the industry has all have all looked at this as being, oh my gosh.

It's the, it's the battle of the, the, the biggest entities, the biggest players in the market. This is Aruba versus Mist versus Juniper versus HPE, who, who, you know, I don't know what the, what the particular cage match looks like, right? But, but the one that gets shaken out is the one that, um, I don't think anybody expected to.

Right? I think that them setting aside, uh, I is certainly reinforces their statement that they weren't looking to acquire another wireless end company. Um, didn't realize that that was the case when they originally announced the acquisition, though.

And, and I think the, the, the challenge was that, you know, DOJ said this is gonna, you know, hurt competition. And, um, while, you know, licensing out missed technology is, uh, an interesting approach. I don't know that it actually addresses that underlying complaint that, you know, uh, HPE gets to eat their, uh, one of their primary competitors, uh, in a wireless.

And I don't know what, you know, we still don't know what that landscape looks like. To me, it signals that, uh, HP has a plan of what their wireless portfolio looks like post acquisition. And I don't know that that includes the, the, that that would signal to me that maybe they think it doesn't include missed long term.

And that's the part I think that gets people excited, especially given we just saw, you know, Gartner posted their magic quadrant and who's the, who's the person away up into the right, you know? Ooh, can we cut, can we talk about the mq? Because I feel like there is a whole string of events that just occurred.

If you, if you rewinding the clock back three weeks, it was Cisco Live. If you rewinding the clock back one week, it was HPE Discover, and it was the release of the Gartner mq. And by the way, the MQ was, was quite flattering on the mist side of the house, was not very flattering on some of the other manufacturers side of the house.

And so you sort of wonder about, or at least I wonder about Gartner's Magic Quadrant taking the the most up and to the right person and not realizing that they were essentially on the chopping block. Like, I'm not entirely sure how, how, how MQ puts them up on a pedestal. And the industry basically says cut 'em, auction 'em off, feed 'em to the wolves.

It almost feels like that the Gartner component is actually a couple of weeks behind, right? I mean, if they've already gotten everything into the pipeline actually started, you know, fleshing everything out from the quadrant perspective, right? And getting, getting that planned out and like, Hey, go, go to publish it, and then suddenly DOJ drops this and you're like, well, wait, what's going on?

So, but even before that, yeah, but I, but I think even before that, I think a lot of us, it, at least I'm speaking from myself here and some, some, uh, other counterparts of mine, um, we all suspected when HPE made the announcement that they were buying Juniper, we were like, okay, cool. So they're buying mist. They're buying it for ai, for the AI component.

That that's the way, that was the read that a lot of people took on it at the time. Um, and the fact that now HPE is coming on and saying, oh, well we don't, that's fine. We can sell that off.

We can auction that off. Uh, it is very telling to me that actually they actually were trying, they are actually are trying to pick up the rest of the, the portfolio, um, of, of the Juniper portfolio. Um, and I think the one, um, elephant in the room that nobody's really talking about is HPE just bought their way into the service provider market in a very, very big way, um, by buying Juniper.

Let me circle back to the premise a little bit because you guys have both touched on something that I think is kind of important to think about. Ed, you just said that one of the things that everybody was talking about when this acquisition was announced was, oh, HP is buying mist. Sam, you talked about the fact that the Magic quadrant has Juniper missed very much up and to the right.

They're, if, if you think that upper and writer is, is better, um, they are the leading company in the Magic quadrant. Um, uh, I I've seen it spun a bunch of different ways too from a lot of companies who are not upst and Rightest. But I think that where that kind of comes into play with the premise of this episode is that for a lot of people in the, in the industry, Juniper missed was the value of Juniper.

They were the ones doing the most aggressive marketing. They were the ones that were pushing the limits of AI and integration. And, and Lord knows that we've seen enough of those presentations at Mobility Field Day over the years from the Miss team and then the Juniper Miss team.

We know that Juni presents at other events. We, we've seen them at Cloud Field Day and networking Field day and AI infrastructure Field Day, but it kind of felt like all of the steam was behind the Juniper Miss team. And now what we're hearing is that it's not, and honestly we're hearing that because the Department of Justice just came out and said, Hey, can it get rid of it if that's what it takes to make this acquisition happen?

Like, like how can somebody have the wind knocked out of their sails that fast? Well, in addition to it being the Department of Justice, both, both companies have said, okay, that sounds good as well. Like, it's not just the DOJ, it's like it's a mom and dad said, Hey, yes, you're redheaded and you are a stepchild.

Go away. Yeah. It's, it, it is interesting to, to, to see that everyone has kind of said, okay, we need to do that.

All right, fine, we'll do it. Um, and I think, I think the other thing that's under underlying this is that it also really underlies a lot of the change that we've seen just in the last 18 months. 'cause this was announced in, was January of 2024, I think when they announced it February.

So it's been about 18 months. And one of the things I think we're seeing is, is we're seeing a lion's share shift or not, uh, line share is the wrong word, but a, a tectonic shift in the AI landscape and with the explosion of open AI claw and, and the other major LLMs out there. And it kind of makes you wonder if we've started to get to a point where maybe a lot of the AI technology is starting to become commodified.

Uh, how's that for an interesting thought? Um, you know, the lot of the secret sauce was in the AI engine, the AI ops component, right? So how much of that is kind of being devalued not just from a DOJ perspective, but just from an industry perspective as a whole?

Well, I mean, I think it was at the last mobility Field day presentation that they presented at. I think they literally said they drew a timeline and they're like, this is the beginning of the company and this is where we did investments and blah. And then they marked a line and they said, and this is where we transitioned to commercially available LLMs or something along those lines and, and scrapped doing all the other stuff that they were doing.

And so, and so at some point they did, um, start leveraging more mainstream available AI solutions. And, and you're right. It's like, I mean, I realize that doesn't just equal, it's now completely off the shelf and you can just go, you know, do a GitHub poll and everything.

You're gonna have just as much stuff as they're gonna have, right? But you wonder about the, about the importance of the modifications they're doing to it, and what do they really bring to the table in order to make something like that happen. I'm not entirely sure there's a good out here because if they go to auction and they end up getting, and, and somebody or somebodies ends up winning them, that just, that just totally devalues what it is they bring to the competitive landscape.

And and if nobody bids on them, then they're proven worthless. Well, uh, that, that's a very good point. I think the other thing to keep in mind is that it's also for a license to use this, use the software.

It's not for an actual like chain off as auction off the assets in, in total. Thank you for pointing that out because you're right, you are effectively buying a year's access. Maybe it's, it's, um, something that can be renewed on a yearly basis.

But you are buying a license for Juniper, mi, Juniper, AIOps for mist, and you are buying the option of hiring 35 technical Juniper employees who are familiar with the operations of Juniper, uh, AIOps were missed, and 20 people who are familiar with selling that solution. So you basically are buying a license to use it for at least a year and the option to hire 55 new people to figure out how to make this work, what company out there a has the money? 'cause we, we know for a fact that the DOJ thinks the auction for this is gonna go north of $8 million because they have written a pro proviso into the contract or the remedy for what happens if multiple companies build bid more than 8 billion, $8 million.

And that's M 8 million, not 8 billion. Um, here's the other question that I have. What company out there isn't already working on an AI operation solution for their platform that would be willing to buy this and then spend the next 12 months trying to figure out how to integrate it into the platform that they've already got?

Like, one of the things, having, having worked in, uh, at, at, at Juniper firmware's hard stuff in the cloud is easy, right? And so, uh, when you start saying, Hey, we're gonna, let's license this thing, can you imagine having to go back and rewrite all of your AP firmware to support getting the right data to, I mean, even, even Mist for years said they didn't wanna build an access point. They built one 'cause they needed good data to feed their ai.

And that's the, the question, are you gonna, my experience has been that the, the AP firmware is the, the really hard part. Are you willing to go back and spend, you say 12 months? I would say probably more like 18 to 24 months rewriting your firmware stack in order to support that piece that, you know, is, is out there and, and other folks can leverage.

Uh, But, but that's a good point, Jake, is if you know it's gonna take more than 12 months, why would you, you limit the license term to that? Uh, and I, to to me, this, this leads me down the, the, the real value of mist to HPE and that is what the DOJ has enabled them to do, which is eat one of their fiercest competitors, right? They get to eat the competitor.

They say it's not about mist, but this, this, you know, auctioning off kind of commoditizes some of that. They're, they're derailing their big competitor. They're also potentially derailing a new competitor to that space for 18 months while they gear up for this, like buying themselves and maybe other competitors like Cisco time to, to figure out the, the strategy and move forward.

I, I think that's the real value here that, that the DOJ has has given to HPE And, and, and they also just opened up a licensing revenue stream. Well, I don't see anything in the, I don't see anything in the court order that says that it must be a short term license, nor do I see anything that says it must be a perpetual license. Um, although there is, there's a bunch of claims in the, um, in the court order around the instant on licenses because that's all aos eight based and they need perpetual licenses and all, like all that fun stuff.

But I don't see anything about a duration for the mist for AIOps, um, license. And so that could be them retaining control over it. It could be going out to somebody else.

It could be going out to multiple others. I guess my question is, is I've heard the story from Mist for so long about how full Stack is better, right? You need to have visibility across every device in your portfolio.

And here they are, they're gonna basically be out on their own looking for a vendor who has everything but wifi and I don't know that that, I don't know that that home exists for them. Uh, I, I don't know. I, uh, I I feel there's a little bit of, of, of that.

Like, I think, um, I Is that the message they sent because they wanted to sell you full stack, or is that the message they sent because they felt they needed full stack? So, um, you know, that, that to me is, I, I don't know if that's the value, but I feel like if you're saying, Hey, I'm gonna give it to you for the wireless land, that's about the, the the only thing that I, I think from the original DOJ complaint, was it anti-competitive in wireless land? And I feel like this is kind of a, um, a kiss the ring moment.

Like we're not really gonna get the, the, the com the anti-competitive things out, but if you give up some wireless land things, um, it shows that you gave a concession and, and can move forward. And we have seen the DOJ recently go after other businesses for other reasons, um, to say, we're gonna hold up your, your acquisition unless you do things that we want you to do. Not necessarily anti-competitive things.

But, um, I I, I, I wonder if this is just a, we want concessions out of, out of HPE and Juniper and because the complaint was filed about wireless land, we have two wireless land concessions and, and really doesn't have to do with the value of, of Mist. It was what HPE was willing to give up. But here's the other thing that people have to understand because this has been the other part of the value of what Mist has delivered to Juniper.

If this was just something that was running in the wireless networking space, I, I don't know what I would think about it, but we know for a fact that the, uh, Juniper missed Juniper AIOps for missed product line has been pushed across all of Juniper when the purchase happened, which one of the things that a lot of people said was, I can't wait for this AIOps stuff to be delivered to campus networking, to routing, to a bunch of other things. I mean, there was even an article that was, uh, published on the Packet pusher's website just a couple months ago about how AIOps was being ported to Juniper's routing portfolio. So for them to kind of hang this on, this is a big wireless problem, and that's what we cited in the complaint.

So all of our remedies have to be around that. The rest of the software is pervasive across the campus networking line. At this point, you can't buy a Juniper switch that doesn't have the capability of running AIOps for Mist.

So what, how is this gonna impact things that are not wireless? I, I think the, the other piece of that is, you know, um, the, the DOJ complaint was specifically around wireless, but that's not the only area of overlap between these two companies. Uh, uh, access layer switching, uh, huge, huge overlap between these two.

Uh, SD wan, I mean, HP has Silver Peak and SD branch and, and, uh, Juniper has, uh, the, the one 20 T uh, so, so there's, there's a basically a, a enterprise networking company that you could literally spin out of, uh, in terms of the overlap. And I, I feel like that when you talk about anti-competition, like if they're not gonna, if if the missed bits really aren't that important, it, it feels like there was an opportunity to keep that competition in the market by spinning, let's buy Juniper for the service provider, uh, and, and DC business and spin an, uh, an enterprise player back out, such that there we wouldn't have anti-competitive behavior. That was definitely not what the DOJ said.

So, um, like that's not the decision they came to. So my take is, is that's the real value, which was we, we get to, you know, um, um, take a, take a player out of the market and com and, and less competition like that to, to me, I feel like that's where HPE like hit the, hit the lottery, whether or not they, they keep the missed stuff, whether or not they go out, they, they settle the SD WAN or access layer switching, you know, stuff like, they basically got to eat a competitor and, and take away someone they were struggling to compete in sales with. Well, and I feel like maybe there's some relief over on the HP side of the house.

Maybe they, maybe they're thinking now they don't have to deal with it because that was what, that was the number one topic of conversation last year at Discover. It, it monopolized every single conversation. And of course they didn't have any answers to it because they can't.

And so you almost wonder if they're not breathing a sigh of relief right now, oh, thank gosh, we don't really have to deal with that whole missed problem anymore. We can just turn around and license out. We're not gonna use it then.

Right. Well now it, it, it also, it also raises a question of, of, um, the perception of value of Aruba Central and the AI component within Central, right? I think there's, I think there's another play to that.

Um, you know, ki kind of, Jake, to your point, what you were, and, and Sam, you know, both what you were saying in terms of, well, they're kind of like saying, okay, well fine, we can spin this off. So that almost feels like they're actually starting to bank a lot more and say, Hey, we have our own solution here that's already baked in across much like mist across the rest of the enterprise networking line that they were starting to build into Aruba's done the same thing within campus switching within SD branch, SD access, um, or sorry, SD branch, silver Peaks, SD wan, that's the word I wanted. Um, and also data center.

Don't forget ar uh, Aruba does play in the data center space as well. So, uh, it's, there, there, I I, I think Jake, I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of what you were just saying about the, the antitrust angle, not just outside of wireless, across the rest of the competitive landscape, across the enterprise and data center. I think it's a really, really good point, um, that, uh, it is one that I think a lot of people are glos over 'cause they're saying, oh, well, a lot of the industry was thinking, a lot of it was focused on wireless, and now we're saying, well, wireless isn't a big deal.

We got the rest of it as well. Well, I mean, let, let me take off my moderator hat for just a second. I mean, the reason why they're not worried about anything other than wireless is because, well, HPE doesn't compete in the carrier router space.

They, they literally, and they don't really compete in the data center switching space. If we're being honest with ourselves. I'm, I'm thinking that, and, and yes, if you are an HP Aruba networking person, Scott, Nick, all of my friends out there don't hate me for saying this.

You guys were not competitive in the data center switching space. You had data center switches and you sold them usually to people who bought other HPE networking kit or they were going into GreenLake installations that you, you, you, you did the same thing that IBM did whenever they made a switch for their blade centers. We need to have this so that nobody goes to buy somebody else's and, and we lose out on that sale.

Like, like the, the, the biggest overlap was in the wireless space and possibly in the campus networking. So that's why it seems like a lot of the, the remedy stuff is focused there because you're not reducing competition in the market. I mean, you, you're reducing what, 2% market share in the data center switching space.

Okay. So, uh, you know, I, I came, uh, I was at HP Discover last week and sat in the 75 minute keynote of which approximately 25 seconds was devoted to enterprise networking. Um, all in the rest of it was AI compute data center, um, storage, more ai, more data center, HPE or, or should we say HPC?

Isn't that the new logo? Um, with the e sort of as an afterthought, right? Um, the, the, the new company is clearly sending signals that data center is where their focus is at almost to the exclusion of everything else.

And, and you could feel it, there were three wireless companies there that were supporting wireless solutions. Like, it was, it, it was clearly clear, clearly felt de-emphasized I guess, this year. And I don't know if that was intentional or not.

All right, so we, we've been, we, we've been debating this for quite a while. Um, but I guess that, that we need to circle back kind of to the premise of this episode so that everybody at home kind of knows. I, I mean I think we all kind of agree that yes, whatever the Department of Justice just proposed is a remedy that HPE and Juniper seems to have agreed to pending a judge's approval that it has devalued the company.

What can mist Juniper missed, missed on its own do to improve its value in the eyes of potential customers in the future, knowing that it's gonna be in a very weird situation? I think this all just lands very poorly for Mista. I'm not entirely sure there is a clean way out, unless there is only one auctioner or auction E and unless they only get, unless they get licensed to a single company and a single company only for, for perpetual, right?

That's basically their only way out. And, and that means they have to rebuild that they have to start from the ground, uh, to start from ground zero. They have some traction in the market, they maybe could do that, but it's gonna be a long uphill battle for, I think it's gonna come down to, um, it's gonna come down to what HP comes out and says about, you know, post post acquisition, like once this finishes, um, they're gonna play the, they're gonna play the game 'cause they have Juniper missed customers that they are going to want to not alienate, um, in the short term folks whose equipment they're gonna have to maintain for some period for continuity reasons, right?

It's not like you could just turn all that stuff down tomorrow. Um, and how do you make that transition for those customers into HPE land in a way that makes those customers happy? Like, um, I, I think is gonna be really key for H HP to, to HPE, to to, to figure out.

And if they can't, I think it does the exact opposite. It's gonna open the door back for the 800 pound gorilla Cisco to, to go win that business back. 'cause let's face it, the folks that were buying, you know, ARPA Networks and the folks that were buying Juniper Mis were, were buying those because they wanted alternatives to Cisco.

Um, and, and so I feel like either, either MIS has that has to find some way to continue to exist and that portfolio to continue to, to provide that value or, uh, HPE is gonna concede a bunch of business back to Cisco, which I think is also, uh, the anti-competitive nature of things. So Yeah, I, I was gonna, I don't think I can add anything else that Sam or Jake has not already hit, hit the nail on the head on. I think As you can see, this is one of those contentious subjects that is probably not going to pay off anytime soon.

But we knew that as soon as the US federal government got involved in this acquisition, because the gears of the Department of Justice grind slowly and completely to dust, sometimes we don't know what's going to happen. We need to await the approval of the judge. We need to await the approval of the auction terms and the outcome of set auction to see who the bidders are.

And there's a lot of moving parts, even if the company that prevails in that auction, uh, gets some value out of it. And I'm sure we're probably gonna be talking about this months from now, uh, trying to figure out what the ultimate end goal to all of us is. But one thing is for sure, we know there's gonna be movement on that acquisition and we know that someone's gonna be getting value.

I guess the question is who's getting it and what is it ultimately going to be? That will just about do it for this episode. We want to thank you all for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast.

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