HPE to buy Juniper Networks in $14bn deal

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to acquire Juniper Networks for about $14bn, highlighting a growing appetite by chief executives to return to large-scale dealmaking after a sharp decline in merger and acquisition activity in 2023.

The enterprise technology business that was split off from HP’s PCs and printers unit in 2015 has agreed to pay Juniper’s shareholders $40 per share in cash, representing a 32 per cent premium on the company’s stock price prior to reports of a potential deal.

The move underscores the desire by HPE, which focuses on making hardware and software for data centres, to bulk up its networking offering as the latest artificial intelligence systems demand ever-faster communications within and between servers. Juniper will be the largest in a series of recent acquisitions in IT management and AI.

“HPE’s acquisition of Juniper represents an important inflection point in the industry and will change the dynamics in the networking market,” said Antonio Neri, president and chief executive of HPE.

“This transaction will strengthen HPE’s position at the nexus of accelerating macro-AI trends, expand our total addressable market, and drive further innovation for customers as we help bridge the AI-native and cloud-native worlds,” Neri added.

The takeover of Juniper will mark the end of independence for a survivor of the original dotcom boom. Juniper was founded in 1996 as a rival to Cisco and went public in 1999. Its stock rocketed to almost triple its value on the first day of trading, hitting a $65bn valuation in October 2000. But its stock price slumped when the dotcom bubble burst, and never recovered those highs.

Juniper announced a restructuring plan in October to cut hundreds of jobs, after a tough year in which some of its biggest customers in cloud computing and internet service providers pulled back on…