DOJ Clears Way for the HPE Juniper Networks Deal | Tech Field Day News Rundown: July 2, 2025

Does AI hate books. Cisco Ice gets chilly remote flaws. Microsoft is shucking kernel access hammer space gets cloudy, Intel broker gets busted, and we're gonna make fun of the Department of Justice in this episode of the Tech Field Day rundown.

Happy summer everyone. It's July 2nd. If you couldn't tell by the fact that the sun is 20,000 miles closer to the earth right now, and we are very happy to be bringing you this hot edition of the Tech Field Day rundown.

Um, I did wanna point out that, yeah, it's hot outside and it is national Wild, bland, firefighter Day. So do me a favor and don't let those guys work anymore than they have to. Um, but I also wanted to mention that it's a national Anna Set Day, and if you don't know what that is, I looked it up for you.

It's licorice alcohol. Don't do that. I know Steven loves that, but he's not here right now.

Alistair, as my co-host this week, what's your perspective on black licorice flavored alcohol? You know, I've not had a large amount of it and it, uh, yeah, no, no. Let's, let's keep it that way.

And I think, uh, I think We're in agreement here. Yeah. Although your part of the planet is, is 20,000 kilometers closer to the, the sun.

My part is not. And so it's a little chilly here. So, uh, I'm having some cool, cool temperatures that I'm sure you're jealous of.

Uh, I at this point. Yes. Yes I am.

No matter if they're in science degrees or freedom degrees, I would like them to be a little bit cooler, but don't worry, because we've got some great news headed your way that'll warm the cockles of your heart. And I'm actually gonna start off with something that may not warm that heart up a little bit, because Open AI and anthropic are taking very different approaches to using books to train their AI algorithms. Andro bought millions of books and then proceeded to cut them all up and scan them into the big behemoth, uh, algorithm.

OpenAI apparently went a slightly different route, and they used technology to download textbooks from lots of torrent sites. Neither method seems to be what I would consider to be a traditional method of research, but I guess the question is, we've always heard that, uh, generating access to electricity is killing trees, but now it looks like these models are trying to kill the already dead trees. What's going on?

Yeah, it was an interesting couple of stories that I saw, and you'll see in the links that there was two different stories on this. Uh, one of them was the approach that Anthropic took. Now, apparently, it wasn't their first approach.

Their first approach was much more similar to the open AI approach. Uh, anthropic got one of the, the guys who used to head the, um, the scanning of books for Google for their project and said, yeah, go scan all the books. Wow.

It's a lot of pages. Uh, of course, the method that, uh, Google used in the past is non-destructive with automated page turning and automated switching from one book to another. Uh, but that's relatively slow.

Uh, anthropic, um, needed a, a much faster method. And so just cut the spines off and deal with individual pages and don't try and put the, the book back on the library shelf at the end. Uh, it's this purchase of the books is because you're allowed to do whatever you want with a book when it's finished.

But my recollection of going to the library when I was young and such things involved going and looking at books rather than going to the library to get internet and power, um, my recollection was you're only allowed to scan a small percentage of, of the, of a book for a particular purpose. So it'd be interesting to see just how compliant with fair use it is to cut the book in half and, uh, basically use it to build a huge database, which is what these engines are. These, uh, foundation model engines are.

There was a, a lawsuit brought by authors around the approach that OpenAI took where they said, well, lots of people have already scanned books and there's, there's lots of electronic copies available out there. Well, let's go just soak down some of those. And that seems to have been an illegal distribution because philanthropic weren't paying the original authors anything.

Unlike OpenAI who paid them the pittance that an author gets for each single copy of a book that that gets published, uh, OpenAI went out and just slurped up every electronic copy of book that they could find on every illegal location that these things are stored. So there'd be no requirement to pay. Uh, it seems that there isn't sufficient evidence that individual authors can actually take them to court and say, you've, you've stolen my works and, uh, done this illegally.

But probably all of this traffic from these torent sites has been beneficial to the current site owners because that scraping of, um, these torrents will have involved showing some ads. And that's how the Torrent companies make their money is from showing you ads. So yeah, there's been some interesting approaches to gaining massive amounts of information, essentially all of the written works of humanity in all time.

And, um, it's, there just isn't a precedent for trying to amass that information and use it for commercial gain in the past. Yeah, I still like holding a physical book and turning the pages. Um, certainly my two daughters love the smell of a, uh, page turn on a, um, on a real book, Cisco's issued a warning.

It's re regarding two maximum severity, remote code execution vulnerabilities in the identity servicing engine, ISE, uh, the flaws impact various versions of the ISE and Cisco's strongly advises users apply immediate security patches as there's no workarounds. Um, although there are currently no active exploits that probably won't last for long. Uh, there's also a medium security authentication bypass who's always worrying that's been disclosed.

Uh, although there are fixes out, it's just that customers haven't always deployed these fixes. Security vulnerabilities are always gonna turn up response to it. Workarounds, deploying things.

Tom, are we just talking about being good at doing it helps you here. Alright, stop remediate and listen, because Cisco's back with some brand new contention. I I had to, I I just had to.

If you run a security appliance, you have to know that that thing is under attack constantly. And especially something like the Identity Services engine ice, it is effectively a gateway product that allows you to get to resources, right? 1 x or, you know, some kind of on authentication mechanism for VPNs and things like that.

So you have to know that if attackers wanna try to get the keys to the kingdom, they're going to open up the locksmiths box to try to get them. And that's kind of what ICE does. Uh, two maximum security or pretty highly rated vulnerabilities.

Yeah, that's, that's a thing. Uh, Cisco says there's no workaround you need to patch. Now, this should not be news to anybody.

Uh, in fact, you probably should have been looking at all of the, you know, severity notices coming out. Uh, this came out really closely on the heels of Cisco Live. So I imagine this was probably something that Cisco had known about.

They just, they didn't have anybody available to kind of push the patches out, uh, any sooner. But, you know, it's, it's the nature of the beast, right? And you are right, Alistair, following proper procedures for it, patching and security.

Um, you know, remediation is the best way to do this because it, it doesn't matter what the problem is, right? It could be a zero day exploit, it could be a bug that's been in the code for eight years. It could be a certificate problem, it could be a user escalation issue.

If you are doing what you're supposed to do, you're applying patches regularly, you're testing, you're, you have multiple layers of, uh, defense in depth. The ultimate results of what these things could do is mitigated somewhat, but you've got to make sure that you are working with the vendors who provide these things, and you've gotta make sure you're staying on top of current technology. Because one of the things that will doom you is if you buy this thing off the shelf, you stick it in the corner of your network and everything works, and you just leave it there running, never applying patches, never auditing policy rules, you know, never turning off users that are supposed to be turned off.

Um, those kinds of things can come back to bite you. And you, you definitely don't wanna be bitten by this. Um, it, it'll leave a mark.

There's a vulnerability in the a MI mega rack firmware, which is used by baseboard management controllers. And guess what? It's under active exploitation.

The vulnerability was discovered back in March, and it affects servers from multiple vendors, including Fujitsu, Qualcomm, and Super Micro. The mega rack firmware provides the red fish interface for the remote management system, which allows power control of servers and is often used to install or upgrade operating systems unattended and remotely. Wasn't there a story about some state actor trying to put spying hardware on super micro servers in the past?

Or am I hallucinating that? Well, you might've seen it in a scanned book in your AI system, Tom, but definitely there was a previous story about hardware being inserted in supply chains to achieve what's now being done through redfish. Uh, if you haven't used them before, these, uh, baseband, uh, baseboard management controllers or BMC uh, tools are used for remote management.

We use them a lot where we've got fleets of servers. We attach them to a separate network, a management network, but we use them to do things like taking complete control of the server that they're installed in, but doing it from outside of the server operating system. And so bypassing every security tool you've installed on that operating system, um, vulnerability in these network, uh, these, uh, BMCs, uh, the network attached, they have their own independent networking, the, uh, US cybersecurity infrastructure security agency.

The CIA, uh, has rated this as a 10 outta 10 vulnerability. There's a authentication bypass that allows access into the BMC at fully, uh, elevated full high privilege, uh, levels that will allow full control also export of all credentials that are stored within the BMC. Uh, this absolutely could be used to provide corrupt images of operating system installs to reinstall an operating system to do a system wipe on the entire server.

This could be used for a massive attack to essentially wipe out all of the physical servers in a, uh, in a customer's network. It's not quite so simple as that because these management networks are never supposed to be directly connected to the internet. Once again, it's good practice.

And if you haven't followed a good practice, then you don't have enough layers of defense against this. But if an attacker has managed to compromise one of the systems that's on your management network, um, can then reach through into the BMC management controllers on all of your other servers, this could be a huge attack surface. Uh, and so protection of these, these networks is important.

What we're seeing is that there are updates for some vendors for their bmc. So updating the firm were to remove this vulnerability. But this is a place where customers are notoriously slow at doing updates.

Whilst operating system updates are fairly easy updates to the base pain management controllers is not something that, that's usually on that regular schedule. But as Tom highlighted in our previous article, you need to be across the security, uh, notifications and, and the updates that are available for all parts of your environment because every part of your environment can be an attack vector. So definitely this is a pretty critical one.

I, um, always loved having remote management service, so I didn't have to drive in the middle of the night to, uh, to connect and, and, uh, press the power button on that hung server at 2:00 AM I've got flashbacks to that. But as a vulnerability, this is a pretty severe one. And you should look at your servers if you've got redfish firmware installed, make sure it is up to date and that your vendor has provided an update that deals with this vulnerability.

Microsoft's hinting at a long-term plan to restrict access to the Windows kernel for third party applications. SMOs aimed at enhancing system stability and security after widespread, uh, incidents like CrowdStrike outage. Uh, while some security, uh, software relies on critical kernel mode interaction, uh, and has code that runs inside the Windows kernel, this carries a huge risk of system, uh, crashes because a crash in the system, uh, kernel takes down the entire machine, whereas a crash in user mode just takes down that one process.

Microsoft's developing new capabilities that would allow these applications to operate safely in user mode and gain access to the kernel mode insights through an API that Microsoft provides. Public statements are pretty vague at the moment. This is an idea that I think Microsoft is floating out and hinting at a gradual transition, but I think they might want to do this fast.

Cybersecurity experts believe that the company is paving the way for an eventual ban on direct kernel access, aiming to provide the best of both worlds, uh, scenario where security tools can function effectively without compromising the kernel's integrity. Tom, do you need to be in the kernel or is an API good enough for you? No, no, I, there's no reason to be in the kernel.

Um, in fact, if you rewind to last year's rundown, when we covered the CrowdStrike fiasco, I think I specifically said, get people out of the kernel. Um, and here's why I know that you don't need to be in the kernel because other operating systems don't allow kernel access like that. Uh, when you look at Linux or the Darwin kernel, which runs os uh, Mac os, uh, you, you don't get to play in there.

Um, uh, okay, maybe dos or older versions of Windows. Okay, let's be fair. Nobody's running those either, uh, unless you're an airline.

But the, the thing is, there's no reason for those systems to need to run in the kernel. What happened is, is that the only way to get them them to run in the oil in the past was to inject them into the kernel, and then everybody got complacent, right? Like, oh yeah, no problem.

It'll always be there until something happened, right? And, and we know that the CrowdStrike scenario is the gift that keeps on giving for those of us who write and do the news because it's just gonna keep going and going until someone prevents the system from taking everything down. Uh, years ago at Tech Field Day, we actually had a great presentation from Arista Networks, and they were talking about the fact that one of the biggest advantages that they had in their EOS operating system was that they have isolated and compartmentalized the, the demons that run the system.

Uh, not the little pokey hair, uh, tail, guys with the pitchforks. Now these are the operating system demons, and one of the things that they mentioned was the fact that in other companies operating systems that were mono kernels, uh, something as simple as the status LED uh, process crashing could potentially knock the entire system out. And Ken Duda the CTO and, and Chief Geek when it comes to coding over there was just like, why?

Why is that a thing? Why, why should a status indicator demon be able to take the whole system down? Well, I would flip that back on Microsoft.

Why should anything be able to do that? If you isolate the kernel and allow it to run kernel only processes that you have vetted and verified will not crash the system, and then provide access for these other systems to have that access through APIs, through function calls, through external systems that cannot directly impinge that kernel, then you have created a system that is more resilient to failure. Look at something like a little snitch, the firewall program for Mac os.

It used to be that it did run a kernel module and it required ridiculous permissions to get installed and get removed, and then there was a shift in the way that, uh, MAC OS did network stack interfaces, and they had to completely redo it. Now, granted, one of the things that that means is, is that when you install an update for a little snitch, you don't have to reboot the whole system because you don't have to update the tur the kernel module. Now, think about that.

Think about all the number of times that you have to reboot a Windows box. Well, okay, I'm granted, I'm a little old, but like all the things you have to do to reboot a Windows box because the kernel needs to be updated because in drivers need to be done. Why just take all that out, leave it sitting over here, not in user land necessarily, but maybe in like super user land or whatever, and that will prevent a lot of these problems.

It's, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out, although maybe if Microsoft hired a couple more rocket scientists, they wouldn't be in the mess that they're in right now. Hammer Space has launched their tier zero data platform in the Oracle Cloud marketplace to help speed up AI and HPC workloads on Oracle Cloud infrastructure. It allows fast direct data access from on-prem systems to OCI GPUs without the needing to copy all that.

Data tests show that it delivers two and a half times faster, reads two x faster rights, and 51% lower latency. And that helps out because it reduces GPU idle time and supports large real-time data use in hybrid cloud setups. The move strengthens Oracle's position as a very strong option for high performance AI and compute needs.

And given the amount of focus that's been put on AI workloads as of late, Oracle wants all that sweet sweet AI cash. So I guess my question for you, Alistair, is what advantage does Hammer space give to people that wanna run AI and Oracle Cloud? Yeah, everybody wants to pile in for that, uh, that AI money and those, certainly everybody is spending a lot of money to get that AI money and Oracle will have been no exception with OCI buying a whole bunch of GPUs.

So getting customers to use OCI for those GPUs is absolutely crucial. The Hammer Space Tier zero platform is really cool capability to leverage the storage in your GPU hosted servers as a high speed scale out kind of storage, uh, architecture where it functions almost like a case of the data that's on premises and allows you to work with that data that's on premises without actually wholesale copying it up before you can actually start using it. And then also getting that benefit of having usually some nice fast NVMe SSDs in your new, uh, GPU equipped service.

So this stuff is, is very much about making sure that you can feed data in and outta your GPUs as fast as possible so that they're not sitting idle as that data is being moved any more than is required. Uh, generally this is one of the big challenges for reducing the cost for AI training. I don't see this as being used as a, a way of doing foundation model building, but what we are seeing is a large number of enterprise organizations are doing fine tuning.

They're taking a foundation model that's been built by one of the, the big players where they've spent tens of millions of dollars and then they're taking that general purpose knowledge and, and adding more knowledge about their organization by this fine tuning process. At fine tuning requires quite a lot of CPU power. It requires a lot more CPU power and particular GPU uh, memory than is available on premises often.

And particularly it requires about 20 times as much CPU memory as actually used in the model to for inference. So training is a pretty intensive activity and best run on the cloud where you can use that resource for a brief period of time and hand it back, but of course, you don't want to have the cost of having all of that corporate data sitting out in the cloud replicating it, the delays of getting it out there as well as the, just the cost of storing it long term. So this is a good solution around optimizing the use of the GPUs and optimizing the use of your on-premises data without having to transfer that data out into the cloud.

I think this is a really good thing. Nice that Hammer space is in the marketplace on OCI. So you don't have to do a separate integration to get Hammer space Tier Zero, uh, deployed on your GPU cluster, and you can make it part of the automated deployment process that you use as you build out your, uh, fine tuning AI cluster for maybe four hours once a week to fine tune your model.

That's the kind of use case where this, uh, the scale out, uh, access to GPUs and not needing to copy large volumes of data back and forth is really valuable. Intel broker, the notorious hacker who's caused over $25 million in damages, has been arrested in France, known outside of cyberspace as KI West. He faces charges of infiltrating over 40 companies and stealing sensitive data, then selling it on breach forms for over $2 million.

He faces charges from the US Department of Justice for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit intrusions and the US wants on US soil, and he wants them ex him extradited from France. Uh, Kai West was, uh, apprehended through tracking of cryptocurrency, the supposedly untrackable, but actually incredibly trackable way of moving money around. And it was a payment made to a Coinbase account that was linked to him.

That was the ultimate, uh, way he was found. Tom, is there any way to hide from the financial trail if you are wrongdoing? Um, not if you want to get paid.

And I think that's the problem that ultimately happened here, is that, uh, our friend, the Intel broker, wanted to get paid. Uh, you may remember him from such hits as, uh, hacking into Cisco's dev portal and stealing a whole bunch of information. Uh, he also, uh, jumped into Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and got some of that stuff.

And, and then probably the one that I think was the most hilarious is that he hacked the, uh, DC Health Link and then offered to sell a whole bunch of PII from the house of representative members to, uh, to the internet. Um, but ultimately this was not a crusade to improve security like a white hat hacker. Uh, this was not a statement, a political statement or a manifesto.

This was somebody who wanted to get paid and that ultimately was his downfall. Because look, I I, I've, I've watched enough James Bond movies in my life to know something important. Small unmarked bills might be untraceable, but you do have to put those in a bank somewhere eventually if you wanna be able to spend them, uh, especially in the modern world where everything runs off of digital payments as opposed to cash.

And this is ultimately what happened. He, there was a payment that was made to Intel Broker for some service that he provided, or some information that he, he purloined and that crypto wallet was tagged to Kai West or it might've been Kyle Northern 'cause he had a, an alias. And of course, I mean, if you've gotta look for Southern and Eastman and all the other members of the Westing game, shout out to everybody who had to read that in middle school.

But it was one of those things where no matter what kinds of protections that you put in, in the front of the house to protect your identity from all of the nefarious things you're doing, uh, all the cops have to do is watch the bank and eventually they will find you and, uh, they will get you because that is ultimately their goal, right? And, and it was a British national that was living in France doing all of this work. So first of all, I don't know how much longer he could have been there because you know, that whole thing with the eu, uh, he may have had to go back at least a little bit.

But now that he's in France, which does have an extradition treaty with the United States, uh, I'm, I'm sure they're going to want to bring him back over here, um, and find a way to make him pay for everything that he did. If not in restitution, um, you know, they'll seize his Coinbase account or whatever, then, uh, they'll just, uh, send jail and he can, uh, enjoy hacking on iron bars instead of, uh, you know, big iron computer systems. Well, it's time for us to take a closer look and it's a closer look at a topic that has been near and dear to our hearts.

As the saga has unfolded, the US Department of Justice has announced a settlement in their lawsuit against a proposed HPE acquisition of Juniper Networks. The release says that in order for the deal to move forward, HPE must sell off the instant online of Aruba networking access points. And additionally, Juniper must auction the license for third party use of Juniper's AIOps for missed.

The details of the auction are complicated. Up to two com companies can win the rights to license through the bidding process, and Juniper must make up to 55 employees available to be hired by one of the winners to work on the product, including incentives for Juniper for them to move companies. The deal is still pending approval by a judge, but most people are treating it as a done deal.

Tom, where do we start digging through this pile of things? I got a bottle of tequila 'cause we might be here for a while. This came out, I believe, either late Friday or Saturday.

I got the email from HP on Saturday saying, Hey, we've got a resolution to this thing. And when I looked at it, I was like, that's really weird. I don't quite understand why they're doing that.

So let's talk about the first part first because it's the least consequential part. A Puba networking needs to get rid of instant on access points. Why?

Uh, it was a line of access points, uh, that basically was for a small business or you know, small to medium enterprise where you only manage like four devices, uh, that you know, realistically you just want the access point hardware, you don't need the, the controller software or any of that other stuff. You're not gonna pay a monthly or yearly feed a license into the cloud, whatever. Not sure why they didn't get to keep that, but now they're saying, we gotta get rid of it.

And HPE said, sure, no problem. The other thing, and this is where most people have the point of contention. So when the acquisition was announced, almost everybody that I know said, oh, great, HPE is gonna get Juniper and mist and this is gonna be amazing.

And then the Department of Justice came out and said, this is gonna create less competition in the market for wireless companies and we can't let that stand. And a lot of people were scratching their heads going, but really it's because there's more than three vendors in the wireless market. But okay, and then this remedy comes out and you're not buying Juniper AI ops for missed, you're buying a license to use it.

Now, as was pointed out by my friend Sam Clemens, when we recorded an episode of the Tech Field Day podcast about this earlier today, there's no set limit on the amount of time that you get to hold this. And there's no set like restriction other than the fact you gotta bid on at auction. But as my other good friend Jake Snyder pointed out on that call, you are looking at a minimum of 18 to 24 months to integrate whatever they're doing into your product line.

If you weren't already working on this, you probably don't have a plan to do it, which means you are literally starting from ground zero. That's why there was a provision in the auction for you to hire up to 55 Juniper employees. 35 of them are technical assets that know how the product works, and 20 of them are sales assets that know how to sell the product.

But HPE controls the, the, the code, right? Because you're not buying source code, you're buying a license to use the product. Okay, but why?

So when you, and when you hear from Antonio Neri, which you know, he, he came out with a statement on Monday and he said, well, we told you that we weren't buying this for the wireless stuff. We were buying it for other things. Yeah, they have a data center switching infrastructure, they have a carrier router infrastructure, they have a campus switching infrastructure.

There's a little, a lot more overlap in the campus switching in the wireless piece, but Juniper missed AI ops stuff is infiltrating all of the rest of those product lines. There was an article that came out earlier this year about how they're applying the, the Juniper ai, uh, Juniper missed AI model to things like carrier routing, which okay, great, I'm down with that. So does that mean that they're not gonna develop that anymore?

Does that mean that they say that we could do it better in-house? Does it not integrate with Aruba Central? I mean, I know that the messaging from Discover last week was, you know, there was a lot of talk of AI and all the things that it's gonna do, but we know that a lot of that is in service to things like GreenLake, where why buy the compute when we can rent it to you in perpetuity, um, like a cloud.

So I'm still scratching my head on this, and that's not even counting the conspiracy theories that people have been spinning about how the CEO of Cisco flew to DC for weeks on end trying to convince the DOJ to secretly wreck this deal. And it was really apparent whenever the Gartner Magic Quadrant came out and Juniper Mist was in the upst rightest part of the quadrant, which means that they must be the bestest of all, and Cisco was actually over here in the wrong spot. And this is all some kind of weird conspiracy theory, and that's pretty much what I tuned out.

Um, but Al speaking from someone, as someone who is not intimately familiar with the wireless aspects of this, what do you think is the advantage for HPE pretty much giving in to agree to this ridiculous auction in order to get the rest of Juniper as their new networking division? Well, I think the simple answer is they didn't think that the missed AI ops was the most valuable thing they were buying, but they, they already have some AI ops capabilities ever since the nimble acquisition AI ops has been a thing that they've been building out through the storage side of the business and there's no reason that couldn't continue to build out across more of the portfolio. So AI ops absolutely is important, but I don't think that that, um, HPE was starting from ground zero on AI ops and trying to to catch up.

On the other hand, lots of the bits of the market that Juniper in are not places that are a huge overlap for HPE. And so having, uh, somebody who in those wonderful Gartner Magic Quadrant is UPS and rightist in in the enterprise networking seems like a good place to, to acquire if you're not already ups and rightist in that section. So I think, yeah, this, um, interesting collection of restrictions put on by put on by the DOJ don't necessarily correspond to actually being a problem for HPE or also being that significant.

I think one of the telling parts on this is that although this is a multi-billion dollar, uh, acquisition, the price that the D OJ DOJ said was the minimum license price was $8 million. Like, we've already spent more than that on coffee for our lawyers. This, this amount is not anything significant.

It doesn't value that missed AI ops very high if you say the minimum price is $8 million, if you say the minimum price was know $200 million, then we're starting to, to think about this being a, a significant piece of the value that's being acquired. But you're very clearly stated that the thing that you had a problem with this operations and, and um, and AI for wifi is not actually there for mobile is is not that significant. You haven't valued it very highly in the overall deal.

So it does feel like you're straining on a net whilst you're swallowing the camel. Although of course it's a particularly tasty camel, particularly for HPE as they get into another nice piece of market. And I think, um, my friends at Juniper are, are pretty happy and excited about this as well.

Tom is is there some other place where there's Juniper products that are gonna extend and expand what HP has traditionally done in networking? Yeah, I think that the, the goal of this was the data centers to switching infrastructure they needed, they needed this acquisition for that carrier. Routers is kind of a, I don't know, it's like IBM's mainframe business, right?

Is you are the last buggy whip manufacturer. So you are, you are gonna make money on that no matter what. You don't have to put a whole lot money into it to compete.

Yeah, you, you have to put a little in there, but the data center switches are where those real value because it allows them to really focus on building out GreenLake stuff. Yeah. Alright.

The Aruba people are gonna point out that yes, they did sell data center switches and I've never seen one deployed that wasn't in an Aruba HP Aruba network. Like, like people did not go to HPE as the primary vendor for data center switching if they weren't already buying HPE kit. Um, it's kind of like, you know, in the old days when IBM would sell you everything for a blade center, um, even if the switches weren't branded as IBM, they, they got you ones that kind of really only worked with that system just because they didn't wanna sell you ones from Cisco or Nokia or whomever.

So I I I feel like they're telling the truth when they say that this was not about the wireless part of it. And for the record, um, it is $8 million minimum to get a license for Juniper AI ops for mist. Uh, Juniper paid $400 million to acquire mist.

So it's what, 2%? Uh, at best. So I I I think, and someone pointed this out to me, I think they already have a bidder in mind.

Uh, the, the, the clunkiness like it, it's gonna be two, it can't be three, it could be one maybe, but if both, if more than one company bids over $8 million, then it's the two that they select randomly. We, there's a link to an article from CRN that actually explains this process way better than the order does. But yeah, it's like, it is, you, you know how it is when people will ride an RFP so that only one person can win it.

That's kind of what this feels like. And, and I've been noodling on this all day yesterday and today who would buy this? I still don't have a great answer.

And maybe the point is, is that nobody's gonna buy it. They're gonna put it out there for, um, auction and that people are gonna bid on it and they're gonna refuse the bid or whatever and they're still gonna keep control over it and everybody's gonna be happy. 'cause Rami Raheem gets to take over the networking division at HPE and he gets to basically finish out his career there.

Um, they become the clear number two favorite against Cisco pretty much everywhere, uh, riding that new momentum from their magic square that says that they're the upst and rightest and the bestest. But I think what's gonna end up happening overall is we've already heard rumblings behind the scenes that there's a coming culture clash with some of the divisions inside of the company where, you know, HPE kind of has this stayed, um, traditional approach to marketing and things like that. And, and these are the upstarts coming in, like, no, we're gonna do things this way and we're gonna do that this way.

And I've already heard of, well we've already seen a lot of people who have departed on both sides of the fence saying a lot of the HP Aruba networking people say, well, I'm not really gonna have a place over at Juniper when they come in, so I'm gonna move or I'm gonna leave. And likewise, a lot of Juniper people feel like that they were gonna be replicated. But the biggest thing I think is that I feel like the Department of Justice almost in a way, they jumped out in front of this and said, well, we have to give them a concession because we halted this.

Like we, we absolutely have to say that we did something because if we don't, now we're gonna look stupid. And the other thing is, is that they made it as penalty free as possible because if this acquisition doesn't close, I believe it's by October, then I believe it is HPE that owes a billion dollars to Juniper as kind of the, uh, the, we are serious about doing this acquisition out. So expect the, the, as soon as the judge signs off this, expect it to accelerate so that they don't have to pay that.

But if this ends up being kind of a, a window dressing kind of thing and uh, if there's no real bidder for instant on, people are gonna have to go back and look at what motivated the DOJ to do this and it better be a better answer than what looked like we had to be doing something. Yeah, if I'm gonna look stupid, I'd rather look stupid with my mouth shut than say something stupid and have people know for sure that I've done something stupid. And I think, uh, DDOJ may done better if they just said, yeah, actually things look good.

Hey everyone, future Tom here just got done with an analyst call that was being held because the HPE Juniper Networks acquisition closed on July 2nd and uh, got to hear from Antonio Neri and from ROI Raheem, who is now the VP and GM of the combined HPE Networking Business unit. And I was actually able to ask the question, who retains the rights to Juniper AIOps for Mist? And they asked the question and it was answered.

And I just wanna make sure that I update our story here. Uh, the license is just a license for use and support. Uh, it is not a divestiture, it is not a transfer of intellectual property and it is only the AI ops portion.

It is nothing else. Um, according to Rami and Antonio, the innovation engine for Mist is incredibly strong now and well into the future. They have the best talent in the industry and they have over 10 years of experience and learning from real world deployments.

So it sounds to me like what's really going on is this was just a small piece of a very bigger hole that was required to be, uh, licensed out or at least the option to license it out. Uh, this is not a divestiture, uh, it looks like Mist is gonna be staying with Juniper and there are actually lots of questions around how Mist is gonna be integrated into all of those product lines. Of course, you know, we're just a couple of hours into the closed acquisition and they're not entirely sure yet, but, uh, just wanted to make sure that we updated the story to let you know that uh, it looks like things are sticking in house for a while and we're gonna have to see where that goes.

But we have a week coming ahead and Tom, you have a, uh, a bit of an event running starting a week today, so you're not gonna be with me on the rundown next week. You're gonna be doing something else. You're right.

I'm gonna be back in sunny California and I'm gonna be talking about networking. Um, I mean you gonna be talking about networking with HP Aruba Networking at Networking Field 8 38. We've got a great lineup of presenters that are gonna be taking place on the ninth and the 10th.

com. You can see all of the amazing, wonderful, uh, schedule and all the fun stuff that we have planned. And then, uh, right after that, you know, we're gonna take the summer months off or in Al's case the winter months because you know it's gonna be a little warm.

Uh, but we're gonna be coming up on Tech Field Day Extra at Share Cleveland on August 19th and 20th. Stephen Foss gets gonna be, uh, basically driving to work 'cause he's right around there in Ohio and uh, he's got some exciting stuff set up for Share Cleveland. Make sure you check tech phil day com for more detail.

Speaking of excitement in September, al, what's going on with you? Well, once the temperatures have dropped a little bit more in, uh, in, uh, Northern California, I will return. I'll be back out for AI Infrastructure Field Day.

Uh, the last AI infrastructure Field day was a massive four day event. Uh, I'm hoping that I don't get quite so exhausted on this new one, but it's already filling up quite well. September 10th, 11th, probably 12th as well.

We'll be back with AI Infrastructure Field Day and then of course, two weeks later, it's back to you again, Tom. Yeah, we are gonna be doing the next edition of Security Field Day. We are thrilled to have some great presenters lined up already, brand new companies that you haven't heard from at Field day before.

And, uh, we got some other ones in the works, but I don't wanna talk about that because it's secret. com and stay tuned for all of the great information that we're gonna be releasing there. I promise you it's gonna be a lot of great conversation, just like we always have, not only at Tech Field Day, but each and every week here on the Tech Field Day rundown.

Remember we publish our episodes on Wednesdays. Uh, you can consume this as a YouTube video if you are subscribed and have notifications turned on so you know when it goes live. You can also download us in your favorite podcast application of choice to go on your run, your bike, your swim climbing a volcano, whatever it is you do.

And then you can also see the rundown streamed on Textron tv. And, uh, if you have the Textron TV app downloaded, you can catch it there as well. Um, don't forget to check out the other Textron, uh, TV and Rum group, uh, productions there as well.

We've got a lot of content coming out of Discover Cisco Live, um, you know, a lot of other great places that you're gonna wanna, uh, learn about all the cool stuff, not just the technical side of things that Al and I bring you, but the executive perspective and, and a lot of other stuff there will, well, I say we al and a co-host will be back next week, uh, to talk about all the cool IT news that happened. Um, and I'll be back the week after that because, you know, I just can't stay away from this place. But I promise you I won't be drinking any anset because I, I respect my taste buds too much for that.

Um, be sure you tune in and if you wanna leave a comment or, uh, let us know what you thought of this episode, please feel free to do so. We love to read those. Until next week, take care of yourselves, stay cool and we'll see you for the rundown.