89. 2026 Is A Bright Year for HPE and Juniper – Tech Field Day Podcast

2025 was a big year for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and for Juniper Networks, and we finally got to see the merger of these two networking giants. In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, we believe that 2026 is going to be a bright future for HPE and Juniper. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of it technical experts to discuss a single idea about key concepts in the industry.

This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, and is often associated 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, tech Strong tv. In this episode, we will be discussing the future of HPE and Juniper.

But before we get into that, I wanna introduce our guests for today's episode, starting with jd. Hey folks, Jonathan Davis or JD here. Uh, first of all, happy to be here and, and be part of this.

Uh, I, my, in my day job, I am a, uh, senior wireless architect with a, um, partner. Uh, and so I spend quite a bit of time working with various customers on their wireless, uh, projects. Hi, my name's Keith Parsons.

I've been doing wifi for Okay. Way too long since before my hair was white, and I do wifi all over the globe. And, uh, happy to be here.

And of course, I'm Tom Hollingsworth, the event lead for all things related to wireless and mobility here at Tech Field Day, which is a part of the Futurum Group. Let's jump into today's episode. The year of 2025 was an exciting one if you are fans of HP or Juniper, because we finally got official approval from the Department of Justice after a denial to carry forward with the acquisition.

And once that happened, they hit the ground running. It took no time at all for them to start looking at how they're going to build a bright future. And in this episode of the Tech Field, a podcast, our premise is that 2026 is going to be a bright future for HPE and Juniper.

So I kind of wanna start it off by talking a little bit about what was kind of in the back half of the year, because for everybody who's listening to the podcast, the first half of 2025 was not so bright. Like we got news that DOJ decided they were not going to approve the merger, and then kind of in July, we heard that they would, if there were certain conditions that were met, and there were some questions about that. But once we kind of got to Q4, we really saw acceleration on that front.

I, I got a briefing right before HPE Discover Barcelona about some new access points that were gonna be released, some, uh, new software that was gonna be, uh, developed. But more importantly, I kind of saw the hints of, of the growing together of these two, uh, companies to kind of be a unified front where, you know, before they kind of have been competitors, and now it seems like they've, they've gotten a lot of, um, work done trying to make them one unified system, bringing Marvis into Central and, and things like that. Is that the perception that you guys have from being in The industry?

Well, yeah, I, I'll gladly jump in on this. I think the perception was two competitors coming together. They were both pretty strong competitors that, uh, who is, who is gonna win?

Well, you know, it, it was thinking the word competi, this versus that. What I've seen in the last, just in the last 90 days, is the, the teams from both sides are getting along amazingly well. I, I, I thought to be more of a battle.

I think from the top down, there was some, um, pressure to put certain people in charge. And because of that, uh, um, it, it changed the attitudes. The, the ex Aruba HPE guys who, who basically took on the, the missed Juniper ones, uh, the missed Juniper guys are, are in and leading together.

They're both saying the same story I've heard, um, with in customer calls that both sides are like, if you're an Aruba customer, you're gonna still be happy. If you're a missed customer, you're still gonna be happy and the teams are working together. So, uh, what I've seen actually out in the field is that it, it's far better than I thought it would be.

And I think part of that is about the people that they actually are caring about the people they both had, you know, customer first, customer last, and white glove. And they're merging those, those feelings that they want to take care of their customers. And if you're a customer of either side, I think you'll still be taken care of.

Well, I think, uh, really kind of going right along with what Keith said there. I think that's the thing that's interesting to see. Um, on one hand, I'm not too surprised, uh, for those who don't know, I, I was a prev previously a Juniper Networks employee, so I've actually worked under Rami.

I have a, I have a quite a bit of respect for the man. Uh, I, I believe in him as a leader, and I'm really happy to see that, that he is leading the networking unit, uh, going forward. I think that's a, a great decision.

Uh, you know, on the part of HPE, um, I do believe in his ability to kind of make this work if anyone can. Um, you know, we have already seen, for example, the announcement that, that there is that kind of dual personality AP that will be able to work in, in a couple of different, um, configurations. And, and, you know, with, with both Mist and with Central, uh, you know, so we're already kind of seeing this alignment of the, the, the companies.

And I think that's key. That's, that's what customers, I think that's kind of like the first speed bump that customers need to get over, right? Um, because if, if on the other hand they in instead saw kind of internal fighting, um, the, um, a misalignment of messaging, I think that would probably ramp up some of those concerns.

Um, but I don't think, honestly, I don't think Romy's gonna allow it. And I think, uh, we, we've already seen exactly what Keith is saying. We've, we've seen this alignment already, and that is, uh, it's certainly looking promising for, for 2026.

I think it's important to bring up the fact that you typically see this in an acquisition scenario where you have, uh, existing product lines that kind of have some development going on on them. And then you have these other product lines, and there's this idea that we're gonna run them in parallel for a little bit, and then we'll start migrating some of these features. We'll pollinate them across.

But we've also seen quite a bit where one train seems to be the dominant version that everybody really wants to use, and they kind of neglect the other side when it comes to feature pollination. And then you run into a roadblock eventually when someone says, oh, well, you have to include all the integration features of this neglected train over here. And a lot of people end up throwing up their hands saying, I, I can't do that integration because there's no way for me to get all of the stuff over here that everybody likes over onto this new code base, under this development system.

And that's where we typically see road bumps, uh, or speed bumps in the road, so to speak. Um, I can go back and think about, you know, trying to move wireless controllers from one code base to another, trying to move SD wan, um, platforms from one code base to another. Uh, I mean, we saw that with, uh, even Apple laptops where it's like, oh, you can run Windows in bootcamp.

Well now you can't because our chips don't support bootcamp anymore. And that kind of a hard cut mentality really irritates customers because like, I liked what I had over here, and now you're telling me I don't have that anymore. Now you're telling me that Nat works differently, or like, this whole thing doesn't work the way I want it to, and it's buggy and it's, it's painful.

So I think it's important for Romy and the team that HPE Juniper networking to understand that there are facets of what they want to use that need to be integrated into central sooner rather than later, so that you don't run into one of these dead end code train situations. I I, I don't know if you can totally get away from that code, trains are that way because of how they're built, but I, I think that they're heading in, in the correct direction. One of the big things in, in our industry right now is the difference between, uh, onsite gear and some, some geographies, some legal reasons, some, uh, government reasons mean you have to have onsite rather than all in the cloud.

And they've already came out and said, we're gonna go this route. If you're, if you need on-premise equipment, this is what you're gonna use. And if you don't, and you can go with the cloud, you're gonna go with this route.

And it supports both the mist side and the rubic side. And I think that's really key, right? Um, there is, there, there are reasons to do, uh, either architecture.

Um, you know, I've, I've worked in, um, higher ed, for example. Uh, I have customers who are in higher ed, and it's really difficult in those environments to not have that on-premise architecture when you've got 60,000 clients that are roaming around across, uh, you know, 11,000, uh, access points all within a campus that's, you know, 75 acres or something, right? It's, it, it, it's kind of, it, it's a little bit, uh, uh, those environments often need, um, the capabilities that come along with those on-premises environments.

And with those, uh, environments, there's, there's a certain strength. Um, on the other hand, there's also certain features that we, we now realize have to be ran in some type of cloud or, or a large format environment where we can, where we can either scale the AI workloads or, or scale, uh, kind of the services in a manner, um, so that it really doesn't matter which campus you're at across, across the globe, you get the exact same experience at every one of those, right? Um, so there really is it there, there's, there's two models here.

I'm really glad to see that they're carrying both forward, and I think that's really important. Uh, and, and I think in, in, uh, you know, there, there are a couple of highlights, I guess, um, that they have between HPE and Juniper. Um, you know, the, the on-premise, uh, product from, from, um, from HPE Aruba, um, you know, AOS eight, uh, however you want to kind of think of that on premises, uh, product, it's been a, it's been a strong product for a very long time, and it has a lot of very loyal customers that, um, in many cases aren't interested in, in, in trying to, uh, migrate to a different, um, platform.

At the same point, we've seen some ridiculously, uh, uh, large customers, uh, you know, migrate into the Juniper world, um, because it brought something that, uh, that they needed. Um, so I, I, I think I'm glad to see that both are going, are, are moving forward. Uh, I am excited about kind of seeing where those kind of features shake out.

Um, there is obviously still a little bit of confusion around, okay, well, is it missed or is it central? Um, and, and kind of, you know, so, so there's some overlap there that I think, uh, customers are kind of curious to see how that will shake out. Um, and then I think the other thing that's, uh, I would say it's gonna be interesting to, to watch as we again, consider, uh, customers is, is, is not only, not only how does, how does HPE, uh, Juniper networking, how do they kind of consolidate their products and their messaging, but also now that they have, or as they develop that consolidated solution, how do they then approach the market with that?

Because it, if you read, if you read any of the press releases, if you read any of the, the conversations around this, it's zero. There's zero question that they have. There's a bullseye on Cisco now, and, and they want to, as quickly as possible get to a point where they can pursue Cisco, um, with 100% focus.

So I'm really, I think, I think 2026 is when we're gonna see that vision develop, and I'm curious to see what that looks like moving forward. So I'll, I'll counter your argument here, jd. I don't think there's a question of which platform is going to win.

It's central. That's, that's the end of the discussion. Because no matter what happens Central always wins.

All of the features that need to be migrated into Central to make it operate are what is is going on, right? Like the, I I'm gonna make a whole lot of fanboy out here mad, so if I do, please leave a comment. There's nothing about Mist UI that is magical.

There's nothing that's impressive, there's nothing that's revolutionary or groundbreaking or important. Mist Magic is in the software on the aps, it's in the behind the scenes stuff. It's the stuff that Bob Friday has spent his entire career working on, right?

It is the AI ops part of what HPE really wants for their systems. And we know that because when the acquisition happened with Mist, we started to see that AI ops stuff flowing through all of the campus product lines at Juniper. So everything good about Mist can be extracted and imported into Central.

Central is too big to kill right now. It is an, it is for whatever reason, the platform. So we can integrate those pieces in there and use that going forward, which is a, an asset to a company like HPE because of Cisco works, because of, um, name any one of the management platforms that we've used over the last 15 years.

We keep moving platforms on the other side of the fence, right or wrong, having a unified message out there is the value of a company like HPE, because it's not just Central, it's the fact that central inter interfaces with everything else, oh, you wanna start managing your servers, there's an interface to GreenLake. We can do all of this stuff and integrate it through the whole thing. And that is what's important.

I mean, we saw this at HPE Discover a couple years ago. They spent a lot of money, uh, kind of doing work inside of Central to make it a little bit more user friendly. They're not gonna toss all that out because, well, you know, the Mist portal is a little nicer or a little cleaner or a little faster.

So I think that that whatever, and, and I'll go back to the, the infamous quote that Stephen FoST loves to bring up from Bob Medcalf. Like, I don't know what the future of, of the management system is gonna look like, but we're gonna call it Central because that's what it's gonna be. I I, and I think that's the key, is no matter what, no matter what is actually running in the back in the background, it's going to be called Central.

But Just to counter that, their latest AP that they just announced that it, it's obviously not the flagship ap, but it, it's showing where they're headed. It was jointly designed between both hardware teams, uh, kind of, kind of a low end, something you'd put into, into hospitality, but it has a dual stack built in. It wakes up and it phones home, and if you've claimed it in Mist, it'll become a Mist ap.

If you claim it in Central, it'll become a central ap. And so currently the first product that they're putting out still has dual stack. They're still talking about that.

I think that could be that they want the missed customers to realize we're still taking care of you in, in the short term. I don't think that negates your point, Tom, that it's going to be called Central in the end, but I do, I wouldn't do a hard cut today. I I, I agree, Keith.

I I like the fact that they developed both of those, but we've seen this from companies like Cisco before, right? Where you can run a net on the old aps and you can reboot them and re certificate them and everything. Because I've done that before.

I think that the value is the fact that it's gonna be a quick cut, right? Like, like right now there is a massive install base of the Mist platform and they can't p**s those customers off because when the, if you make 'em mad and the renewal time comes up, we're gone to whatever. But I think that where the value's gonna be is that rapid migration process, right?

Yeah. You're still running on Mist. It's great.

We'll make it really easy for you deploy this script or tell Marvis to do these upgrades, and then in an hour everything will be running on Central and it'll be fine. It, it worked in the lab. There's no issues.

Instead of, you know, having to go out and touch everything or, you know, put this USB stick in it to reboot it or something like that. 'cause I mean, we've seen a lot of that in the past, and today it should be fairly easy, especially if the unified code train does not need to be re reflash or, or config changed beyond pointing it to a different controller this time. Well, part of that's also both companies are, are dealing with microservices that, that are updated quicker.

That's not the old monolithic set of, of control data that we used to have before. You know, I think, uh, you, you touched on something there, uh, and kind of blew by it, but I think it's an important point. And one of the things that comes along with both, um, you know, central and the MIS platform and this licensed, um, you know, ongoing cost is the fact that there is a renewal, um, that everyone of their customers are approaching.

It's not just a support renewal. Um, it's ultimately a renewal that will decide whether that product continues working. Uh, and that changes the, the schedule that they have to work against, um, for their customers.

Because all of those customers that are paying for say, a three or a five year, you know, uh, period of support and and services, um, that that time is ticking down, and you can, you better believe that whenever that time ticks down, they're going to want to have a very clear vision and like, like, not a, this is the general direction we're going, but this is the, this is the product, you know, this is what you can expect over the next three years. And all of those, uh, all of those customers, um, are going to be hammered by the competition, whether that's Cisco, whether that's extreme, whether you know, whatever with a lot of, um, uh, you know, fud that the general sales and marketing FUD of, um, uh, you know, you don't know what's coming for, for that product and, and, but we, we can share the next three years, we can share the next five years. And so I think in many cases, because they're now selling this licensed, uh, renewal process, that also means that they have a much shorter window to answer questions for customers.

Yeah, I would agree. And that's one of the things that we've seen a lot from other companies of integration strategies and things like that. You have about a year and a half to keep your existing customer base happy, but then we know there has to be a migration because one of the things that we see in these big acquisitions is you have to reduce duplicated effort.

You have to merge development and management teams, and you have to come back with a fully, um, realized method of moving forward. Uh, think about, and I'll use this as an example because it's a pretty common one, think about how much, uh, how many things still only ran on Catalyst OS versus iOS. That whole process seemed to take a lot longer than it really should have.

If we're still talking about running things on the missed pro, uh, port. Um, if we're still talking about running things on the, uh, platform, uh, uh, in their portal two and a half years from now, then I think that they will have failed in their integration efforts. I don't think that we'll get there, but I'm just saying that if, if it comes to a point where customers are still right or wrong being told you, if you want these three features, you still have to be on mist.

They're going to say, well then I guess I need to figure out how badly I need those three features because if I don't, I'm gonna move and I may not move to what you want me to move to, because if I'm gonna have to blow things up anyway, now's the time for me to put this back out and decide that I need a different solution. I think you, I think you're both right on this, but I don't think they have two and a half years. Part of the problem with the slow acquisition process is both sets of customers were forewarned and 8, 10, 12 months in advance, their customers were already planning on what am I gonna do post acquisition.

So I think the time window might actually be a little shorter. I, I agree. I agree.

I think it is short. I think the problem is, is that when that timeline drags out due to, you know, the usual things outside of my control, I, I don't think that that's how they're looking at it. I think they're realistically saying sometime in mid 2026, we have to have a roadmap by the end of the year that says, we're merging these platforms, we're moving forward.

You know, you now, the the thing is though, you've gotta have that by discover of 2026. So you're thinking June, because if people are going to be making those big decisions about, well, am I migrating off of mist? Do I need to buy Central?

Is it gonna be a hosted, is it gonna be on-prem? Those decisions take months to figure out. And I know that HP really wants to get that revenue booked by November 1st because that's the beginning of their year, right?

They really would like to see mo positive movement in that direction to kind of end the, the year on a high note for them so that they're not fighting this battle in January of 27 where people are like, Hey, I got my budget this year and we, if you can't give me good direction, I'm, I'm gonna be making moves somewhere. I think there's that, those, those are all true, but specifically in the wireless side, and we're, you know, this is mobility. We're talking about the, the wireless side.

They've already committed that their, their wifi eight AP is going to be a joint project project. UHM just announced their new wifi seven aps that are separate, but the team is working together on their wifi eight. So in the, in the generational movements that we normally see, wifi eight will be that answer for the switch platforms.

Uh, we'll see. And and that's what you want to hear, right? Like, like we know that the, the reason why the wifi seven aps are a separate offering is because they were basically in the can, right?

Like they were done before this acquisition closed. So that's what I would expect. But yes, going forward development needs to be unified and, and I remember like if, if, okay, I'm gonna date myself, Keith will get this reference, but like, this is the problem that Novell ran into when they try to migrate all of network services from Network Kers onto Linux.

Kers was the people who were used to writing software for NetWare blew up Linux because they weren't used to Lin Linux memory management systems. It took them a lot longer to figure out how to write NMS that weren't crashing Linux kernels for longer than it should have. And that actually caused a lot of problems.

I don't know if you guys, again, Keith probably knows this, but for all of you network fans out there, both of you, uh, did you notice that it took like eight service packs on network, six five before they were finally satisfied that this thing could run on Linux before they actually released the Enterprise Linux server and not just services running on on SUSE Linux? Um, I'm dating myself, of course I need Metamucil after that reference because that was a long, long time ago. Well, well, but, but you bring up a, you, you bring up a really important point there and, and that that kind of misstep and, and weakness and, and more importantly frustration that the users felt was the gap that really allowed NT to take off as, as strongly as it did, right?

And, and I think that's, that's the real key here is, um, a again, I have a ton of respect for roi, but he, he is, he's navigating some treacherous waters over, over this transition period and they need to shorten that window as quickly as possible because any, any missteps or any issues, just like you were, you were discussing, uh, with, with NetWare, those are can absolutely be the the decision point because someone's uncomfortable that I don't know where things are going, I don't know what the future looks like, and also I'm experiencing these frustrations that can absolutely be the point that even if you don't know, let's be clear, because I was there, NT was not great, it just was different than the problems they were experiencing. You're, You're as old as you actually did like, what, 3 1 2 on floppy disks feeding it over and over again. Yeah, we're all old, but, but, but we, we have the scars from those.

So we're looking at this new transition with that in mind. How, how did, how do, how do we make it hurt less? And, and, and that's one of the values of keeping old tech heads like us around is we've seen the potholes and we know which ones to drive around.

We also know which ones you have to hit because the alternative sucks even more. Uh, what I wanna get from the both of you, what is the one thing if you, if you had to boil it down to like a, a single like sentence, what is the one thing that HP and Juniper need to deliver on in 2026 to make sure that this acquisition goes into the positive side of the book and not the negative article that comes out on CRM somewhere? I, I think it's down to the people.

They have to merge the teams of competitors and get them both focused instead of at each other in, in their terms. They're, right now they're, they're focusing on, on heap Cisco. And if, if your pre-sales teams and your post-sales teams and your support and all of them are, are headed the right direction, and they're, they're focused on the same thing, I think you can get past any of these other, you know, potholes in the road.

Yeah, I, I absolutely agree with that. Um, I think the other thing is, is you've got to, you've gotta have clear, um, uh, a clear roadmap for customers like that has to be, that has to come out hard. And then you have to, like, once you have a, you establish it, you have to hit your deadlines.

Um, I think that's, that's gonna be the thing that customers are watching the most. Um, they have to trust the process and that's how you, you convince them to trust the process. Um, and then I think maybe the one outlier or maybe that one little, uh, hand grenade that can be, that could potentially be thrown in the mix is, uh, what Elliot investment happens to do.

Um, as, as they're involved in all of this, right? We need consistency. We need to know that things are gonna move forward.

We need to know that, that, that roadmap is, is gonna be hit. But if you suddenly throw a new CEO into the mix of that, um, you could really harm the, the trust that customers have in that process. Uh, my my point echoes Keith's a little bit.

I think that they need to understand that they are no longer playing in the same fields that they've been playing. They have one competitor, now it is Cisco. Everybody else is going to come along doing whatever they're gonna do.

And I'm not knocking any of these other companies. I'm saying that, you know, just as Cisco has kind of lived in rarefied air for a while, HPE is now in the same rarefied air and they're playing catch up, and every move that they need to make from this point forward is focused on one goal. How do we be the best in this area at that?

And if they can't answer that question, maybe it's time to decide to re that product line or to do whatever it else it is, because I can tell you kind of going to John j D's point, um, somebody will make that decision for you and they will probably be sitting on a board or have shares of stock or something along those lines, and you can't afford to get distracted because the race is gonna tighten up quite a bit. Before we head out for today, I wanna make sure that you have an opportunity to find out where to connect with our, uh, guests. So jd, if people wanna follow you and some of the stuff that you do, where can they go to learn that?

Uh, you can find me at sub network on most social platforms and LinkedIn. I am Jonathan A. Davis.

com. And on the socials, I'm Keith R. Parsons, And I will echo that.

Uh, if you have the opportunity to attend WPC in February of 2026, if it's not already sold out by the time you listen to this podcast, you definitely should. I've gone many times. I've had a great experience.

And if you want to get heavily involved in the wireless industry, you should, you should also check out all the stuff that we do here at Tech Field Day. Uh, we have a lot of great videos on the Tech Field Day and Tech Field Day plus YouTube channels, and we are also writing a lot on the futurum group. com for more details.

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