HPE is closing in on a multi-billion-dollar deal to buy Juniper Networks as the company looks to boost its AI ambitions.
The deal, reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), could be announced within the next few days, making it the first big acquisition of 2024.
It would also be one of the highest-value tech industry takeovers of recent years, highlighting the importance of machine learning and AI to the major players in the market.
HPE-Juniper deal
Best known for its cloud offerings, HPE was spun off from parent company HP in 2015, with the latter focusing on its well-known hardware portfolio spanning PCs, laptops, printers and other computing accessories.
Founded in 1996, Juniper Networks has grown rapidly in the past few decades due its successful networking product line-up, including routers, switches, and security products, which have become a common sight in technology and telecoms firms around the world.
But the company also runs Mist AI, its increasingly popular AI and machine learning business, which has been working on using the technology to improve and optimize wireless access for users across the globe.
It recently announced a number of new products and features for its Connected Security portfolio, making extending security services and Zero Trust policies across distributed data centers even easier.
The new products are called Juniper Connected Security Distributed Services Architecture, and they integrate the company’s unified security management paradigm with proprietary routing and AI-predictive threat prevention.
As a result, data centers can experience improved operational simplicity and scale.